02.2015martin Wedell Planning For Educational Change

Planning for Educational Change
Also available from Continuum
Teaching Teachers – Angi Malderez and Martin Wedell

How to Design a Training Course – Peter Taylor
Planning for
Educational
Change
Putting people and their
contexts first
Martin Wedell
Continuum International Publishing Group
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11 York Road New York, NY 10038
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www.continuumbooks.com
# Martin Wedell 2009
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in
writing from the publishers.
Martin Wedell has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 9780826487278 (paperback)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
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Typeset by YHT Ltd, London

Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books, Cornwall
Contents
Introduction 1
Section 1: Understanding Educational Change

1. What is educational change? 14
2. Initiating educational change 22
3. The implementation stage 30
4. Why educational changes fail 43
Section 2: Case Studies

5. A sudden need for english teachers 64
6. A change in teaching approach 89
7. Introducing a new subject in primary school 102
Section 3: Planning to Implement Educational Change:

Beginning at the beginning
8. Introducing ICT to support language teaching in one institution 126
9. Introducing a new national curriculum 135
10. Planning the development of a new initial teacher education
curriculum 156
11. Setting the scene for successful change: Beginning at the beginning 174
Index 180
To colleagues in education worldwide, who are doing their best to
ensure that (poorly planned) national educational change initiatives
do benefit their learners.
Introduction
Terminology: Change innovation or reform?
Writers use a number of terms to talk about change in education. Formal changes
at national, regional or institutional levels whose implementation has apparently
been fully thought through and planned may be referred to in the literature as
educational innovations. Sometimes large-scale national changes to, for example,
the content, structure or hoped-for outcomes of a national curriculum, or to
methods or formats of high-stakes assessment are referred to as educational reforms.
I believe that very similar issues influence the outcomes of educational innovations,
reforms or changes. In this book I therefore use the single word ‘change’ to refer to
all alterations or adjustments to the process or content of education, whoever
initiates them, and whatever their scale or degree of prior planning.
General introduction
Educational changes can come in many forms. They may be intended to affect a
single institution or a whole country. The desired goals of the change may be
simple (such as changing the daily timetable in a single school) or very complex
(for example, introducing a new national curriculum that implies very different
approaches to teaching and learning in all schools). Whatever its scale or level of
complexity, a planned educational change will more or less directly involve dif-
ferent groups of people. Those involved may view the prospect of change differ-
ently according to, for example, their:
happiness with the existing state of affairs
level of interest in professional development
experiences of previous changes
familiarity/sympathy with the ideas underpinning any proposed change
confidence in their local and national leadership
satisfaction with their existing salaries/working conditions
2 Planning for Educational Change
Even within a single country people live and work in a range of geographical,
socio-economic and institutional contexts. These contexts too may differ in how
supportive they can be of an educational change, for example in the extent to
which:
material conditions in most educational institutions in a country or region

are supportive of the ideas that the change intends to introduce
their local or institutional organisational culture is one that is likely to be
supportive of the change process
they have human resources (for example institutional leaders and teacher
trainers) with the capacity to adequately support the change implementation
process
Given the above variations and constraints, it seems obvious to me that plan-
ning for and implementing educational change is bound to be complicated, and
that the visible outcomes of change are unlikely to be identical and/or to become
apparent at the same speed in all institutions or classrooms. However, there is still
a tendency for national educational change policy makers and planners in different
parts of the world to ignore the human factors that strongly influence change
processes. Instead they view the change process as a purely linear, rational-technical
planning and legislative matter. Such an approach seems to assume that once the
policy decision to initiate change has been taken, any necessary legislation
passed and funding secured, successful change implementation is merely a matter
of issuing clear instructions to those lower down the administrative hierarchy to
introduce changes in the classroom from a given date. This approach does not
seem a very likely recipe for success to me, and indeed, in terms of fully achieving
their stated educational aims, many educational change initiatives are not very
successful.
The idea that people – what they believe and how they behave – have a critical
influence on the outcomes of educational (or indeed any) change initiatives is not
at all new. What I wish to address in this book is the need to develop a simple,
comprehensible, widely applicable approach to planning that does acknowledge
people’s central role in determining the rate and route of a change process. Section 3
of this book offers such an approach.
Who this book is for
First, this book will be of value to educational-change practitioners worldwide

who are responsible at any level for the planning and/or implementation and/or
monitoring of changes within an institution, a locality or a region. These might
include:
regional, provincial, city or district level educational planners and

administrators tasked with leading the implementation of national
educational-change policy in their area
Introduction 3
leaders/heads of department in educational institutions at all levels who are

responsible for planning and monitoring the implementation of change in
their institutional/departmental environment
classroom teachers interested in finding out how a change process in which
they are participating might be better managed and supported, and how they
could help themselves to cope with it better
trainers/teacher educators who are responsible for planning, designing and
teaching courses intended to introduce classroom teachers and/or educational
administrators to the rationale for, and implications for practice of, a national
educational change
staff in government departments or NGOs worldwide who are responsible for
making decisions about funding and/or planning and/or implementing
educational aid initiatives, or for training staff who (are going to) lead/work
on such initiatives
A second group for whom the book will be useful (and who may well include
representatives of some of the above) are those teaching or studying on formal or
informal courses in which discussion/analysis or practical investigation of some or
all aspects of leading and/or planning and/or implementing educational change is a
component. Members of this group might include:
masters level or accredited short course students on Educational (Project)

Management, Educational Leadership, Curriculum Planning and Design,
Assessment and Evaluation, Teacher Education and TESOL programmes
tutors/trainers on informal training programmes whose brief is to develop
understanding of the main issues that it is wise to consider when planning or
trying to implement any educational change process, the relationships
between them and what can be done to support all those involved
tutors and students on initial teacher education programmes, which hope to
prepare trainees to cope and grow professionally in what is likely to be a very
changeable century
Who am I?
I would like to say a little about myself for two main reasons. One is that many
people now understand the reading–writing process as a form of interaction or
dialogue, and it is difficult (probably impossible) to feel involved in any dialogue
if one has no idea whom one is ‘talking/listening to’. Second, given that many of
the large-scale educational change initiatives in the world that I refer to tend to
focus on changing aspects of national school systems, you might wonder what I,
currently working in a British university, know about the real issues that those
responsible for leading or implementing educational change processes in schools
worldwide have to face. I share some of your scepticism about over-reliance on
‘experts’ to guide educational change initiatives (see chapter 2.1), but I hope that
sharing my professional background with you will help you to understand why I
feel that I have something to say.
I spent over twenty years living and working in education systems in Africa, the
Middle East, the Far East and Central Europe, often in contexts where national
state education systems were undergoing greater or lesser changes to the content,
process and expected outcomes of their school English teaching provision. The role
and desired outcomes of the study of English in schools has undergone profound
changes in most parts of the world over the past two or three decades, as policy
makers have begun to view ‘knowledge’ of English as an ever more central feature
of general education for learners who wish to succeed in a globalising world. My
work involved planning for and/or implementing changes to curricula, materials,
the content and format of assessment and teacher education provision.
This experience provided me with several clear examples of the close links that
exist between education and politics. I have seen how urgent demands for changes
to the content and process of education may emerge from ideological changes in
national or global political and economic environments. I have seen the negative
effects of such urgency on the quality of change planning at first hand, and also the
effects of poor planning on the different groups of people that any educational
change affects. I have met and worked with teachers, institutional leaders and local
educational administrators who have been ‘required’ to participate in the imple-
mentation of more or (often) less well-planned top-down changes. One impetus to
write this book was strongly prompted by what I know of the – often needlessly
unhappy – experiences of those I met.
Since returning to the UK I have worked almost exclusively with early to mid-
career education professionals from all over the world. Ongoing discussions with
them suggest that the introduction of larger- and smaller-scale educational change
initiatives continues to be widespread. They also suggest that approaches to
the planning and implementation of such initiatives have changed surprisingly
little over the past twenty years and that evidence of truly successful change is still
rare.
Why I have written this book
In my experience it is truly rare to encounter an educational-change context in

which most of those involved at different levels share a common understanding of
the ‘why’, ‘what’ and ‘how’ of change, and so are able to work collaboratively to try
to achieve change aims. I have met educational administrators and/or institutional
leaders whose sole introduction to a national educational change that they are
supposed to ‘lead’ in their area has been a document from ‘above’, containing so
little detailed information about how the change might be implemented that they
are uncertain about how to proceed. More frequently I have met classroom teachers
trying (usually) to do their best to implement change in their classrooms, even
when they do not fully understand the reasons for/aims of the change and/or are
working in conditions that positively hinder their implementation efforts. A first
Introduction 5
reason for writing this book is therefore to try to contribute to a process of making
educational change a less painful process for those involved.
If an educational-change project is not perceived as achieving its intended
outcomes, in terms of learner behaviour or ultimate performance, it tends to be the
teachers who are the first to be blamed or otherwise made to feel as if they are
primarily responsible. A further reason for writing is to try and demonstrate that
teachers are only one of several groups of people inside and outside an education
system whose participation affects the outcome of an educational-change initiative.
While it is teachers who will ultimately determine whether most learners benefit
from the changes, I think it is important to understand that teachers can only be
expected to play their central role in the process if other groups have played, and
are playing, theirs.
My third reason is that I think further discussion of educational change and how
it can be made to ‘work’ better is extremely timely. My experience suggests that
much of the teaching and learning visible in (especially school-level) classrooms
worldwide continues to reflect various versions of a long-standing view that
education should principally be concerned with the efficient transmission of a body
of fairly stable knowledge from expert/teacher to learner. Meanwhile the tone of
much recent educational rhetoric suggests that that alternatives are being sought,
as education systems worldwide increasingly recognize that ‘education’ conceived
of as above does not adequately prepare citizens for today’s changing world. The
twenty-first century is therefore likely to be a period of great change in education
systems internationally, as national policy makers try to understand and develop
alternative means of providing their citizens with an education that will help them
acquire the skills and understandings needed for the continuing, and also rapidly
changing, challenges of techno-globalization.
In most countries education budgets and the availability of qualified personnel
of all kinds are limited. National educational-change initiatives are very expensive
in both financial and human terms. The literature suggests that a virtually infinite
set of interdependent variables may affect the extent to which, and speed with
which, a recognizable version of an educational change becomes visibly imple-
mented in (the majority of) classrooms, or indeed whether there is any change at
all. I believe that a limited number of more universal human and material vari-
ables lie at the core of this infinite set. My final reason for writing is therefore to
propose an approach that I believe can help educational leaders, especially local
leaders, to carry out a quick ‘baseline study’ of these limited but important
variables in their own area. The information that even a hasty or partial study
provides is likely (if able to be acted on) to help make implementation planning
more contextually appropriate. This, I believe, will in turn make it more likely
that a degree of ‘real’ (albeit locally adjusted) change implementation can begin in
most classrooms in their area, so justifying the national investment in change.
What is in the book
It is difficult to know where to begin when considering a topic as complex as

educational change. After all, changes may be introduced in widely different
cultural contexts and may vary enormously in their scope. Some may aim to affect
every subject in every school, others only some aspect of a single subject or single
institution. The discussion and examples in this book deal mostly with the
planning and implementation of national-level changes to aspects of teaching and
learning a single subject (English) at primary- or secondary-school level. However,
I believe (and try to show in chapters 8–10) that there are questions that can
be asked whose answers can usefully inform the planning/implementation of
change whatever its scale, and whatever the subject or level, within any education
system.
To try to make sense of the topic area, I have chosen to divide the book into
three sections. In the first section I survey some ideas from the educational-change
literature (most of which comes from the English-speaking world). I use this,
filtered through my own experience of being involved in change processes, to note
what seems to have been learned so far about the nature of educational change,
especially in terms of the issues that it seems most important to consider at the
planning and implementation stages. Most educational change involves a degree of
‘reculturing’. Every real educational change also takes place in a context. In order
to understand what reculturing will mean for people in any particular context, it is
necessary to understand people’s existing ‘cultures’. I therefore briefly explore the
idea of educational and organizational cultures. It is these cultures, I suggest, that
influence both how national policy makers approach the decision to initiate and
plan a change, and how they, their representatives at local level, institutional
leaders and teachers approach the detailed work of change implementation.
In the second section of this book, I consider three case studies of educational-
change projects that I have more or less directly participated in. For each case, I
introduce the context and the apparent rationale underlying the change. I then
analyse aspects of the change initiation and implementation in the light of issues
from the discussion in section 1. I particularly try to show how lack of care and
thoughtfulness at change initiation and implementation stages can impact on the
feelings and behaviours of the people who are most closely affected, as well as of
course on the ultimate achievement of change aims.
In section 1, I try to highlight some central issues, and in section 2 some effects
of their absence or presence are considered. In section 3 I suggest a small number
of questions that I believe planners/policy makers in any context could usefully ask
(formally or informally) to help identify how these issues are likely to affect the
route and rate of change implementation in their context. I believe that even fairly
limited answers to these questions can (if the answers are broadly honest) provide a
bank of contextually relevant information to help inform the initial change con-
ceptualizing and/or implementation planning stages. I demonstrate what I mean
by asking and answering these questions for three example educational-change
scenarios, and discuss what the answers can tell planners about their change
context in terms of, for example:
Introduction 7
who and/or what the change is most likely to affect

what the effects are likely to be
what decisions and/or plans they need to make to support the change-
implementation process
in what order these decisions/plans could most sensibly be taken to ensure
that they build on, and so support, each other as fully as possible
Each section is followed by a list of references, and sections 1 and 2 by some

suggestions for further reading.
Ways of using this book
I know that in educational change environments decisions often need to be made

quickly and that on courses there is always too much to read. I therefore make a
few suggestions below for readers whose time is limited.
If you are involved in planning for/implementing an educational change

process at any level, you might feel from looking at the Contents list that it
would be sensible to go straight to section 3 of the book to see what questions I
suggest and perhaps whether my ‘answers’ make sense in your context. This would
definitely be a possible starting point. However, if you are to use any of the
information that you find as a result of asking your own questions, as section 3
suggests (especially if using this information involves persuading others to do
things differently), you will probably be more persuasive if you have already
looked at section 1 of the book.
When introducing people to new ideas it is always helpful to have some idea of
their starting points. If you are planning or designing programmes or
documents to support other people’s understandings of the background to
an educational change and/or what it implies for practice, you might begin
by looking at chapter 3 in section 1 of the book, and considering how the main
features of your cultural context are likely to influence the ideas, expectations and
concerns of the people you will be working with. You might then want to skim
the cases in section 2 to see if these are at all similar to your own situation and then
use what you know about your context to try and answer the questions in section 3
for your context. These answers will hopefully (depending on how much time you
have) enable you to design your sessions/documents to maximise the support they
offer.
Almost anyone who has worked, or indeed studied, within an education system for
more than a few years will have experienced some level of educational change. If
you are teaching/studying a programme that includes a focus on one or
more aspects of the educational change process, I suggest that before reading
you think about your own positive or negative experiences of change, and then,
while reading, consider the extent to which any of the factors identified as
important in the book can help explain them.
Although novice teachers may not be conscious of any changes that affected the
education system while they were at school, it is certain that they will experience
change during their professional lives as teachers. If you are teaching on an
initial teacher education programme it is appropriate to acknowledge this
point. The first section of this book might usefully raise trainees’ awareness of
some of the issues they are likely to encounter during their professional careers.
The second section might help them understand some of the factors within and
outside education that can influence how people actually experience the change
process.
Section 1:
Understanding Educational Change

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Setting the scene
I have worked in state-system educational settings in different parts of the world

for over twenty years. Each such system has been subject to frequent policy
changes affecting, for example, areas such as school curricula (and hoped-for
curriculum outcomes) and/or teaching materials and/or modes of assessments and/
or recommended teaching approaches. The manner in which educational changes
have been introduced in the local areas or institutions in which I worked, has in
most cases been through documents sent from, or meetings arranged by, a national
ministry of education. These to differing degrees outlined a rationale for the
changes, the hoped-for outcome of the changes and set a deadline for their
implementation.
Documents were often phrased in terms of what the proposed change ‘required’
or ‘expected’ of teachers, and I expect that you would agree that ultimately it is
what teachers and learners do in a classroom that determines what an educational
change will achieve in any setting. However, my experience strongly suggests that,
if educational changes are to stand much chance of affecting what happens in the
classroom, it is usually not only teachers who have to change. Local-level educa-
tional administrators, teacher educators, school leaders, test designers, learners and
often even the wider public may all, to differing degrees, be affected by large-scale
educational-change processes. Policy makers’ lack of consideration of the wider
change environment extending beyond the classroom when planning hoped-for
changes in the classroom is, I believe, one important reason why so many large-
scale educational-change initiatives may fail to achieve their aims.
The focus of this book is on supporting the local or institutional planning and/
or implementation of educational change. However, since local-level changes are
usually the result of policy decisions made at regional or national levels, I begin by
proposing two possible national-level educational-change scenarios. They represent
tendencies that I have encountered in a number of different contexts. I introduce
them here because they in turn introduce some of the questions and themes that
are central to this book and which will be returned to time and again throughout
it. In that sense they ‘set the scene’ for what is to come.
Situation 1
After a change of government, a decision is made to decentralize the national school
system. Previously all educational institutions and classroom teachers had to strictly
follow syllabuses and materials provided by the central government’s Ministry of
Education. The emphasis was on achieving a high degree of uniformity in what was
taught to learners nationwide, and in how it was taught. Learners worked through
the same textbooks at more or less the same speed before taking centrally administered
national examinations based on these syllabuses.
The new government plans to change the balance of the educational decision-making
process. Instead of the very strictly specified curriculum and syllabus guidelines that
were previously the norm, it provides only a broad curriculum framework for the
various levels of education. It retains control of national examinations, but devolves
decision making on how curriculum time is divided up, exact subject content, choice of
materials and teaching approaches to local educational administrators, institutional
leaders and teachers. They are officially encouraged to make these decisions bearing the
needs of their particular context, and especially their learners, in mind.
Situation 2
Teachers at all levels of the school system are used to having a great deal of autonomy
about how they approach the teaching of content for all subjects. There are syllabuses
for each subject and all pupils take the same national exam. Of course, teachers and
learners wish to do well in these, but it is acknowledged that exams cannot assess
everything that it hoped will be learnt. Teachers are free to make many of their own
choices about the extent to which they focus on particular aspects of the syllabus content,
and about what material and teaching approaches they choose to use to provide an all-
round education and to prepare learners for the exams.
A new government decides that the existing situation results in too much variation in
the quality of teaching and learning in different classrooms and institutions. A more
detailed formal written national curriculum is required. This is duly introduced. It
provides extremely detailed guidelines as to both subject content and its timing, and to
the pedagogical principles that teachers should follow. All teachers are expected to
teach according to these guidelines. Exam league tables are published annually to show
the general public how successful the learners in each school have been in standardized
national exams based on the new curriculum.
QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER
Which of the above situations is closer to the situation in your own edu-
cational context?
How would you feel if you were suddenly expected to shift from your
current situation to the other one?
Who else, apart from teachers, would be directly affected by any such shift?
In my experience, an immediate reaction to an abrupt unsupported shift from

one situation to the other among those who will be affected (local administrators,
institutional leaders, inspectors as well as teachers) is likely to be some form of
Setting the scene 13
visible or invisible ‘resistance’. In situation 1 a reason for such ‘resistance’ may be

people’s lack of confidence in their ability to fulfil all the unaccustomed roles that
they have suddenly been made responsible for. In situation 2 ‘resistance’ may result
from a feeling of anger at the implicit suggestion that the national authorities no
longer regard those working in education as sufficiently professional to be trusted
to continue to make their own decisions.
Situation 1 Situation 2
Great teacher/institutional Little teacher/institutional
responsibility/autonomy. responsibility/autonomy.
Little centralization/standardization. Great centralization/standardization.
Contextual variation recognized Contextual variation minimized
Both the above situations represent movements between two extreme points on
a continuum of how national education systems may be organized. The endpoints
might be characterized as:
Few education systems anywhere are fully at either end of the continuum, and
although situations 1 and 2 both represent a shift from one end to the other, not
all educational changes are so extreme. However, the situations do highlight some
key features of national-level educational change that need to be borne in mind
whatever the degree of movement along the above continuum they may represent.
These are that large-scale educational changes:
are often the result of political and/or ideological change at national

government level, and are therefore often decided on very hurriedly
may represent a major change to established ways of thinking about and
carrying out teaching and learning
affect a large number of people both inside and outside educational
institutions
depend on the attitudes and behaviour of a large number of people both
within and outside educational institutions for their successful
implementation
All of which mean that such changes:
are almost always very complex to plan, lead and implement
In the rest of this book I will try to untangle some of the complexity and
suggest some key questions that local/institutional leaders can ask – and use the
answers to – when planning the implementation of either a locally agreed change
or a local version of a national change. First though it is necessary to find out more
about ‘educational change’ itself.
Chapter 1
What is educational change?
I think that the question ‘what is educational change?’ can be divided into four
further questions:
1. Why do people decide that they want to change aspects of an education

system?
2. What do they hope to achieve by doing so?
3. What is educational change like?
4. What do change-planners and leaders need to consider if they are to be able
to support those involved in making change implementation a success?
Below I deal briefly with each of these, discussing the last two together.
1.1 Why change?
Planning and implementing a large-scale educational change is not at all easy.

Why then might policy makers want to go to the trouble of doing so. One
important reason is suggested by the following quote:
Educational institutions serve both as sites for the perpetuation of society (the
stability thesis) and as sites for the changing, developing and creating of
society (the improvement of society thesis). (Hunter and Benson 1997: 96)
If educational institutions are sites for the perpetuation or change of society, then
one reason for dramatic educational changes such as those represented by situations
1 and 2 above might be that the changes are thought to be needed to support
desirable wider changes in other aspects of society as a whole. Why then might
such wider changes be considered necessary?
One reason for initiating change that seems to be felt in many national contexts
today is linked to the technological and economic effects of globalization. These
effects lead national governments to perceive a need to develop policies that will
What is educational change? 15
maintain or improve their national competitiveness in a rapidly changing global

market place. Existing education systems in many countries have, until recently,
continued to provide their citizens with the knowledge traditionally needed to
enter a fairly predictable and stable range of lifetime ‘employment opportunities’.
Such systems are now beginning to be seen as no longer adequate to prepare
citizens for life and work in a new ‘knowledge age’ (Bereiter and Scarmadalia
1998), in which knowledge rapidly changes and becomes out of date. Education
systems today therefore need to prepare learners for a world in which knowledge is
continuously being expanded, and in which citizens will need to know how to
continuously update their knowledge, and how to ‘use’ what they know flexibly in
a range of different work environments. Educational change in such a context may
be seen as an important means of enabling the nation to ‘keep up’ with other
external changes that are taking place worldwide.
Another reason given for educational change, especially in some parts of the
English-speaking world since the 1980s, has been the feeling that the outcomes of
education need to be more strictly standardized and measured. The initial impetus
for this feeling was ideological and political: a desire by governments committed
to cutting personal taxation in countries such as the UK in the 1980s and 1990s,
to make institutions and teachers within them more accountable for the way in
which (often very large) education budgets are spent. In such contexts the
emphasis when initiating educational change was on designing systems to control
and standardize the content and process of education, to make it easier to see
exactly what the outcomes of education (measured by learners’ performance in
standardized tests) actually were in any given school.
More or less explicitly connected to the desire to see clear evidence that the
money being spent on education does give the desired ‘results’ may be a further
more ‘moral’ reason for trying to introduce greater standardization. By having
clear standards, applied equally in all schools, it is hoped that there will be
‘significant, systematic and sustained change that leads to dramatic improvements
in learning for all students in all settings’ (Caldwell 2004: 423). Such change, it is
hoped, will help to lessen the gap between high- and low-achieving schools and
learners, and so contribute to equality of opportunity within society.
A final and more cynical reason for the decision to announce educational-change
initiatives is that such announcements can provide good headlines for those doing
the announcing. While the rhetoric of such announcements may be inspiring,
unless they are backed up by visible implementation policies, their outcomes tend
to be negative, increasing cynicism among educational professionals who ‘have
seen it all before’. Goodson (2001: 53) calls such change initiatives symbolic, tri-
umphalist action and points out that any triumph is likely to be very short lived.
So far, therefore, I have suggested four possible reasons for initiating large-scale
educational change:
1. to enable the national education system to better prepare its learners for a
changing national and international reality
2. to make the education system more clearly accountable for the funding it
receives
3. to increase equality of opportunity within society as a whole

4. to use the announcement of educational changes for some kind of short-
term political advantage
The main reason more or less explicitly given for any particular change will of
course affect what it is hoped that the change will do, and I look at this next.
1.2 Changes to what?
If the reason for introducing educational change is based upon an idea that citizens
need to be taught different ways of thinking and different skills in order to be able
to cope with a very different and rapidly changing national and international geo-
political and/or socio-economic environment (reason 1 above), the hoped-for
change-outcomes may be quite radical. An example of a ‘radical’ change would be
one where the goal of the change is to try to move from an education system in
which the desired outcome of teaching and learning has traditionally been seen as
the accurate transmission of knowledge (see chapter 3.2), to one in which the
hoped-for outcome is to develop learners’ ability to acknowledge and understand
different points of view, and through thought, interaction and experience, learn
how to construct their own, more personal knowledge.
Any such transition process will of course have implications for many aspects of
an education system. The very core of education – ‘how teachers understand the
nature of knowledge and the students’ role in learning and how these ideas about
knowledge and learning are manifested in teaching and classwork’ (Leithwood et
al. 2002) – will need to be reconsidered. Teachers will need to be helped to get to
know, and be able to work with, new ways of thinking about knowledge, the
teaching–learning process, and teacher–learner roles in that process. There will
need to be a move away from the idea that education involves all learners being
taught the same ‘knowledge’ in the same way, towards, for example, a recognition
of possible differences between how learners learn (learner styles), what learners
bring to their learning, and/or what responsibility they should be encouraged to
take in their own learning (learner autonomy). Teaching approaches that are
thought to help learners to learn and know in different ways will need to be
introduced. Teaching materials and methods of assessment will be affected. All of
these will somehow need to be linked and connected into a coherent curriculum
document and a coherent plan to guide and support the change process. Inevitably
this process will involve many different people. I did say educational change was
complex!
Conversely, if the change is in response to a feeling that there needs to be a
move towards a more closely monitored system (reasons 2 and perhaps 3 above), in
which there is a much more centralized standardized curriculum and more regular
national standardized assessment against which teachers’ and schools’ performance
can more easily be measured, this too will affect the education system as a whole.
Curriculum documents outlining standards, teaching materials and approaches
regarded as necessary to achieve standards, and assessment methods to measure
whether standards have been met, will all need to be planned, designed and agreed
upon. Teachers will need to be helped to fully understand the standards and
targets expected of learners at different levels of assessment, and to become familiar
with new materials and/or teaching approaches. National, local and institutional
systems to monitor teacher and institutional performance will need to be estab-
lished. Again a whole range of people in different roles will need to work together.
I am sure you can see that implementing such major changes in education is not
just a matter of thinking that it would be a good idea to change, drawing up the
necessary documents and then telling teachers to get on with it. So what then are
some main characteristics of educational change?
1.3 The ‘nature’ of educational change
One thing I can say for certain is that educational change does not become visible
in classrooms directly as a result of a written policy document. Instead, whether it
occurs, and what form it ultimately takes, depends on how people understand
what is written down and how they behave in response to that understanding. As
Fullan (2001: 70) points out, one reason for the failure of so many change
initiatives is that policy makers forget this fundamental point.
Many attempts at policy and programme change have concentrated on pro-
duct development, legislation and other on-paper changes in a way that
ignored the fact that what people did or did not do was the crucial variable.
A way of thinking about the relationship between the official change doc-
umentation and actual change that I find helpful is to regard what is written as:
. . . a musical score – the final effects do not depend just on the score, but on
the expertise and skills of the interpreters. (Farias 2000: 2)
If educational change is dependent on how people interpret and act upon the
written official ‘score’, then what does that mean in practice? I will take the hoped-
for outcomes of change discussed at 1.2 as examples, and think about what would
need to happen for there to be visible changes in classrooms.
First, in either example there needs to be a degree of what Fullan (2007) calls
‘reculturing’ of the people most closely involved (teachers and those responsible for
change planning and implementation). By reculturing I mean that it would first
be necessary for these people to begin a process of adjusting many of their
established professional (and possibly personal) behaviours, and eventually also
beliefs about their roles and responsibilities. This is easy to say, but in fact very
few people (including the author) find it easy to ‘reculture’ (change their long-
standing professional behaviours or beliefs) quickly.
This truth leads us to a second feature of educational change: The more
ambitious and demanding the change is, in terms of its scale, and especially in
terms of the degree of difference it hopes to bring about in what happens in
classrooms, the longer it will take. Exactly how long is difficult to judge. Fullan
(2007), using examples of change mostly from North America, suggests that a
large-scale change may take 5–10 years to become part of normal classroom life in
the majority of schools. Birzea (in Polyzoi et al. 2003) suggests that there are other
contexts, such as those typical of education systems in many countries of East and
Central Europe in the 1990s, where the depth of the reculturing process needed to
make changes of the kind discussed in 1.2 may take a generation to achieve.
Berend (2007), focusing on the same region, believes it takes even longer.
Referring to social transformation, which I believe to be very similar to the
reculturing that much educational change entails, he says:
Social transformation, including the adoption of a new value system and
social behavioral pattern, is not a process of one or two decades. It takes
generations. (280)
Whichever view we take, it is clear that the successful implementation of edu-
cational change takes a long time. It is an ongoing process, not an event that takes
place at a particular point in time. This implies that if a large-scale and culturally
challenging educational change initiative is not to become merely a further
example of ‘symbolic triumphalist action’, the time scale needed for imple-
mentation means that the change needs to be seen as a national, not a government,
issue (Cox and Le Maitre 1999). The change process will continue to need eco-
nomic and political support over what may be a decade or more, and this can only
happen if governments ‘put educational investment beyond their own need for
political survival’ (Fullan 2001: 233). Examples of such governments are unfor-
tunately rare.
The process of planning and implementing educational change therefore needs
to be viewed as a medium- to long-term process whose success, in terms of real
changes to the outcomes of student learning, may demand significant changes to
participants’ classroom practices and beliefs. While ultimately people’s beliefs
strongly influence their behaviour, people often find it difficult to talk about their
professional beliefs to others without reference to actual practices. Any systems
developed to support the many people involved in a change process therefore need
to be able to provide participants with opportunities to experience new behaviours
in action. Only when people have experienced these, and (hopefully) seen some
evidence that persuades them that these do result in better outcomes (however
defined), will they seriously question their pre-existing beliefs. Belief change
therefore is usually a result of noticing visible positive effects of change; it is not a
cause of them. Some ideas about how opportunities to experience new behaviours
might be provided will be discussed in section three of the book.
I have said that for almost any large-scale educational change that hopes to lead
to visible differences in actual classrooms, all people involved will need a greater or
lesser degree of ‘reculturing’ (see chapter 3.2). It is important for policy makers
and educational leaders at all levels of the system to try to understand what this
expectation might mean to people, and how they might react. For me, and perhaps
for you too, being expected to change our existing visible professional behaviours
(and eventually the less visible assumptions/beliefs on which they are based) is
potentially threatening, because it may affect other familiar aspects of our daily
(working) lives. For example, if you or I try to change our longstanding, familiar,
forms of professional behaviour for the different practices that an educational

change introduces, our existing working relationships with learners, colleagues,
superiors, and possibly also parents and figures in the wider society, may all be
affected. These professional relationships matter (Hargreaves 1998). They con-
tribute to our sense of professional and personal success and satisfaction. If I am
not appropriately supported through the change process, I may experience it as an
attack on my ‘key meanings’ (Blackler and Shinmin 1984); my day-to-day per-
ceptions of myself and of my relationships with others that provide me with
important personal and professional stability and security. Since the success of an
educational change depends centrally on whether people are willing to play an
active role in helping it happen, it is essential to consider how the process may
make them feel.
The following quote has appeared in all four editions of the book from which it
comes (Fullan’s The (New) Meaning of Educational Change). The first edition was
published in 1981. The fact that he finds it necessary to repeat it in his 2007
edition suggests that its message has not yet been fully understood.
Neglect of the phenomenology of change – that is how people actually
experience change as distinct from how it might have been intended – is at
the heart of the spectacular lack of success of most social reforms. (Fullan
2007: 8)
Planning and implementing educational change therefore needs to take people’s
feelings into account. Apart from any potential psychological/emotional threats to
peoples’ professional (and personal) self-perceptions, the process of ‘reculturing’
involves developing confidence in new practices and this demands ongoing
investment of additional time and energy from participants. If people are to feel
that their ongoing investment in change implementation is worthwhile, given
that in most national contexts those working in education already work long hours
for less than spectacular wages, the manner in which the change process is planned
and implemented is clearly extremely important.
I imagine that by now you can see that any change planning and imple-
mentation process is potentially complex. The complexity in any particular con-
text will depend on the extent to which the change represents a challenge to the
existing educational reality in that context. It is therefore unlikely that there can
be any universal blueprint or template for the educational change process.
Although this is so, attempts have been made to classify approaches to the process.
One of the most commonly cited classifications of approaches to planning changes
in human systems (which education systems most definitely are) dates back to
Chin and Benne (1969). I paraphrase it here, adding my own comments.
Chin and Benne suggest that there are three main approaches. The first they call
the rational empirical approach. This starts from the belief that people are rational
beings. It assumes that they will therefore respond positively to any expected
change for which there is well articulated and persuasive (research-based) evidence
to show that participating in the change is more or less directly in their own self-
interest. Of course I know, and I am sure that you would agree, that people are not
purely rational beings. In addition, the term ‘rational’ is in itself subjective, since
what may appear completely rational to me may not appear so to you. Conse-
quently, perceptions of self-interest, in any plan for an educational change that
will affect large numbers of people, are therefore likely to vary greatly, regardless
of the ‘weight’ of the evidence offered.
The next they call a normative-re-educative approach. This is based on the idea
that most people are influenced by the attitudes and behaviours of other members
of their peer group. If they see that their peers have changed their behavioural
norms, they will change their own to conform to the new ‘changed’ group norms.
This may often be true, but this approach does not explain how to deal with the
fact that for this process to take place, there first needs to be a critical mass of peers
(Markee 1997) suggests 5–25 per cent of potential adopters committed to the
change process) who have already adopted the new norms. The planning process
therefore has to develop a means of generating such a critical mass before this
approach can be expected to work for the majority of change participants.
Chin and Benne’s final approach is called the power-coercive approach. I feel
that many of you will be as familiar with it and its effects as I am. This approach
takes a very top-down view of the change process. Those who have the power
within the system, organization or institution being changed (the national policy
makers and their local representatives) plan the change with little, or usually no,
consultation with those whom it will affect. They then present the change
documents to those lower down the hierarchy as something that must be
implemented (often immediately or with very little notice), with stated or
unstated sanctions or threats if their expectations are not met.
Although some of the ideas emerging from these approaches are useful (making
the benefits of change as clear as possible to those who will be affected, or trying to
make sure that enthusiastic early participants have the opportunity to encourage
and support more doubtful ones), none of them alone provide a solid model for the
complex process of planning and implementing large-scale educational change.
This has been quite a dense section of reading. So to summarize, I consider some
important features of educational change to be that:
its success depends not on what is written but on how people interpret and
act upon what is written
it is a medium- to very long-term process
it needs to be separated from politics
it can make great professional (and personal) demands of people
it can, to begin with at least, make people feel professionally or personally
unconfident
implementation requires the investment of a great deal of time and effort by
large numbers of individuals
people are more likely to feel that they wish to make this effort if they can see
some evidence that the new practices have, or are likely to have, positive
outcomes
These then are some of the features that need to be borne in mind by those
planning and implementing educational change at any level, if the hoped-for
classroom changes and (usually) eventual wider social changes are to become
visible.
Although there is no uniform template of how to carry out an educational-
change process, the educational-change literature tends to divide the process into
several chronologically linear stages. This is a simplification because in practice
educational change involves so many different people in so many different contexts
that the boundaries of each stage are rarely completely clear and there is often a
great deal of moving backwards and forwards between them. In naming them I
have borrowed most terms (although not always their exact definitions) from
Fullan (2007).
The first stage of an educational-change process, which I will call initiation
(other common names are ‘adoption’ and ‘mobilization’), is mostly a thinking and
discussing stage. It is the period during which the idea of change is first raised, and
when issues like whether it is really necessary, whether it is affordable and/or
politically desirable and what form implementation might take are likely to be
discussed. If changes never get beyond this stage, few people hear of them.
However, if a decision is made to go ahead with some agreed change(s), an active
planning and implementation stage follows. This tries to map out plans for the
first few years of trying to introduce the practices that the change hopes to see in
classrooms. Due to failures of various kinds at the planning stage, the imple-
mentation of many educational changes never really takes place as anticipated, or is
abandoned, before reaching the final stage of the process.
This last stage is called continuation, routinization or institutionalization, and
as these names imply, it refers to the point at which the change is no longer seen to
be ‘new’ and ‘different’, but has instead become a more or less accepted and
unremarkable part of ‘how things are done’ in most classrooms across the existing
system. In my experience, few large-scale educational changes fully reach this final
stage in the tidy and uniform manner that many policy documents suggest that it
will. Instead, as will be seen in chapter 3, where this final stage is reached, many
versions of the original changes are likely to have been developed to meet the needs
of different classrooms across the country.
In the next chapter I discuss some important issues that need to be considered at
the first stage of any educational process, the initiation or ‘thinking about’ stage.
Chapter 2
Initiating educational change
When national policy makers perceive a need for change, perhaps for one of the
reasons at 1.2 above, there are three interrelated factors that I feel it is essential to
think about during any discussion of what form the change should take and how it
might be implemented.
2.1 Starting where people are
An educational change involves people. Some of the people are listed in the quote
below.
Teachers, children and parents all need to adjust their beliefs as well as their
behaviours if they want to satisfy the curriculum. In addition educational
leaders need to modify their beliefs so that they could accept the new
teaching and learning ways. (Zeng 2005: 10)
If, as the quote suggests, the success of an educational change depends on what
people do and think, it makes sense to start any discussion of what a desired
change is likely to involve by considering the practices and ideas about education
that are already familiar to the people who will be affected by the change, what the
strengths and weaknesses of these are and whether the proposed change can build
on them. One way of beginning this process is to take what Tudor (2003) calls an
ecological perspective and consider the existing factors that influence what ‘people’
(teachers, learners, educational administrators and even parents) believe about
education, and so what roles and behaviours they expect of each other and of
themselves.
Initiating educational change 23
QUESTION TO CONSIDER
What does the quote below suggest that parents believe about education,
learning and teaching?
‘Every day they [parents] would usually expect their children to learn
some specific things at school and show them at home. Otherwise they
would question the teaching quality of the teachers or the school.’
(Zeng 2005: 20)
I feel that this shows that parents:
understand the content of education as consisting of specific visible items of

knowledge
expect these items to be taught incrementally, with some new and different
items added each day
judge the ability of a teacher by whether they teach a steady stream of such
items
see learning as involving writing the items down
judge learning by what has been written down
see a ‘good school’ as one in which teachers provide a regular supply of new
items to be learned
The educational reality in any context, however similar or different it may be to

that outlined above, needs to be the starting point for discussion of what change to
introduce and how to introduce it, since it represents the day-to-day setting into
which it will be introduced. If policy makers ignore existing local practices and
beliefs when deciding on the content and process of change, it immediately makes
it very unlikely that the change will ever reach the institutionalized stage of
becoming an accepted and normal aspect of most classrooms.
So how can policy makers become aware of people’s reality, and ideally also
enable representatives of those who will be affected to understand their own
thinking about, and hopes for, change? The answer seems obvious: by talking to
them and closely observing their reality! However, this rarely seems to happen,
since in most (if not all countries) the education system remains extremely hier-
archical. Very broadly, ‘people’ working at ‘primary’ level are at the bottom of this
hierarchy and people working in the better known, older universities are at the
top. In addition most policy making continues to be top down, using some version
of a power-coercive approach. Where policy makers do talk to anyone, it tends to
be to ‘education experts’ who, in a hierarchical system, are usually assumed by
policy makers to be clustered in universities. It may be many years since these
‘experts’ have had personal experience of the national school system. Consequently
they may often be as detached from the realities of the local classrooms into which
new practices are to be introduced as the policy makers themselves.
Limited consultation with a narrow range of academic ‘experts’ continues to be a
common scenario despite widely disseminated research (see suggested further
reading at the end of this section), suggesting that policy makers need to consult
as fully as possible about the content of, and implications for teaching and learning
of, any proposed changes with those who will be affected (institutional leaders,
local educational administrators and teachers). These people are likely to number
tens or hundreds of thousands, so how might consultation happen in practice?
One idea that I like is adapted from Goodson (2003). He suggests that the
teaching profession can be divided into three broad groups: 20 per cent whom he
calls the ‘elite or vanguard teachers’, the most creative and committed teachers; a
further 60–70 per cent of ‘mainstream or backbone teachers’; and a final 10–20 per
cent of ‘borderline teachers’. I believe that this same rough division could be used
for teachers in more or less any country worldwide, and that it also holds
approximately true for other key participants in any educational-change process
such as institutional leaders and local educational administrators. Goodson sug-
gests that representatives of the ‘vanguard’ teachers (and I would add vanguard
‘other people’ also) should be involved in discussions at the initiation stage. I agree
fully, especially in terms of ensuring that policy makers obtain a broadly repre-
sentative sense of existing educational reality. One possible means of involving as
wide a sample as possible would be for policy makers to hold structured discus-
sions at local/regional levels, whose conclusions would genuinely be considered
during final discussions at the national level. Alternatively, interaction between
the policy makers and people, to identify important features of the existing
situation that might influence the type of change and the implementation
approaches that would be appropriate, could be carried out more formally through
an official formal systematic investigation of the existing status quo, sometimes
called a baseline study.
However formal or otherwise such a ‘baseline study’ may be, its value will be
dependent on two factors. The first is whether policy makers understand the sorts
of questions they need to ask to obtain a picture of existing educational reality, and
whom to ask them of. The second is whether they are genuinely willing to listen to
and act upon the answers (especially those that are not what they wish to hear!). If
the wrong questions are asked of the wrong people, and/or if ‘wrong’ answers are
ignored because they do not ‘fit’ preconceived plans, the process will be valueless.
This very process of genuinely trying to find out what existing realities are, and
taking these into account in deciding on what change to introduce and how to
introduce it, will, in many top-down education systems, itself be a sign of sig-
nificant ‘reculturing’ among policy makers.
Questions to ask, some possible answers and suggestions of how to use answers
to inform local-level change planning and implementation processes, will be
discussed in more detail in section 3 Here I provide just a few obvious examples of
variables that policy makers might need to consider in most educational contexts,
in order to identify institutional and individual ‘readiness’ for, or ‘fit’ with, the
hoped-for outcomes of a proposed change:
1. Class sizes.
2. Teaching and learning resources available in most classes.
3. Availability of sufficient appropriate teaching materials.
4. Content and format of existing high-stakes assessment systems.
5. Level and type of training received by most teachers – their existing

strengths and how these match proposed new practices.
6. Existing perceptions of in-service teacher development/support and the
availability of functioning structures for providing it.
7. Teacher educators’ current strengths and understanding of the proposed
change, and hence their readiness to support teachers in developing
confidence in new practices.
8. Cultural assumptions among educational administrators, school leaders and
the wider public (parents) about teaching, learning, the roles of teachers
and learners.
9. Cultural assumptions about how schools should work as organizations in
terms of, for example, relationships between leaders and ‘led’, and/or
assumptions about sharing information.
I see (1) to (3) and (5) to (9) above as representing examples of two different aspects
of any contextual reality. The former group represent aspects that are concrete and
so easily and quickly visible. Some of them can also be changed quite quickly,
provided funding is available. For example, if an aspect of a change relates to
greater use of technology in classrooms, the necessary hardware and software could,
at a cost, be bought and installed quite quickly (whether or how it would be used
is another matter). The latter aspects relate to people – how they behave and think.
Changes to people’s behaviours and, especially, beliefs are less immediately visible
and take far longer. However, if (5) to (9) do not change to ‘fit’ change aims, any
money spent on the visible aspects of the context, (1) to (3), will be largely wasted.
In my experience many educational changes fail to achieve their aims because
policy makers over-emphasize quickly visible concrete changes (for example the
introduction of computers into schools worldwide) and underestimate the
importance of changes in people.
You will notice that I have not mentioned (4). Although it is a very visible
aspect of any education system, there are numerous examples (especially in English
language education) of an apparent blindness among policy makers when it comes
to ensuring that the content and format of high-stakes assessments ‘fit’ the changes
in teaching content and/or approach that they are trying to implement across the
education system. This may be because in many education systems high-stakes
exams play an important social and political gate-keeping role, effectively deter-
mining whether a learner has access to a ‘good’ secondary school or university, and
any changes to exams are therefore potentially very sensitive. However, if people in
a change context (parents, learners, teachers, institutional leaders) see an obvious
lack of harmony between the behaviours/practices underlying the proposed
changes and those that are perceived to help learners pass high-stakes exams, it is
the practices that support success in assessment that will ‘win’.
2.2 Identifying and communicating the ‘need for change’
Large-scale educational changes are usually very time consuming and very
expensive. They involve a degree of disruption to many people’s lives. If they are to
be accepted, they need to meet a clearly visible educational need, so that their
rationale can be clearly communicated to all those likely to be directly or indir-
ectly affected. Preceding and parallel to identifying people’s existing educational
realities, the discussions at the initiation stage therefore also need to seriously
consider why change is needed, what the hoped-for outcomes are, what forms the
changes should take, and how to communicate all of these to the many different
groups of people who will have a more or less direct role in planning and carrying
out the implementation process.
To recap 1.2, the most commonly occurring reasons underlying a perceived
need for large-scale educational change can be summarized as being to:
ensure that the manner in which citizens are educated will help the nation
remain competitive in a rapidly changing wider international political,
economic and technological environment
standardize the content and process of education in order to enable greater
accountability through objective measurement of individual and
institutional performance and progress
better ensure genuine equality of opportunity and so enhance social stability
deflect attention from other (probably short-term political) issues or
problems
If learners and parents are included among those affected by national educational
change, it is probably true to say that national educational changes affect a
majority (or at least a very large minority) of any population. Consequently, to be
able to justify the launch of such a complex, long-term, expensive and potentially
disrupting process, policy makers need to have considered how to explain it to
people at a range of different levels in a convincing manner.
Once a decision to proceed with the change has been taken, an important part of
the initiation process will therefore be to agree how to raise awareness of the
change among those who will sooner or later feel its effects. Different levels of
detail and different means of communication may be appropriate for different
groups of people. However, since the change process takes such a long time, if it is
ever to become institutionalized, it is extremely important to establish initial
awareness of, and social consensus about, the need for and desirability of change.
Shared consensus among such a large proportion of the population will provide a
bedrock of support for all those actively involved, once the implementation stage
begins. Conversely, lack of at least some understanding of the change among the
different affected groups will only increase the complexity of implementation.
This need for wide communication of the change again highlights the desir-
ability of involving representatives of people from all affected levels of the edu-
cation system from the very beginning of the initiation process. The wider the
range of representatives involved at this stage, the easier it will be to communicate
the change appropriately at different levels. I will say more about the need for
good communication in the next chapter.
2.3 Making a long-term commitment
If discussions about the need for change, and what form it should take, are as wide-
ranging as I have suggested, they will take time to complete. This will be the first
stage of the educational change to need funding. It will also be the stage at which
future funding commitments for the agreed change time scale will need to be
made. Assuming a decision to proceed with the change is eventually taken, the
decisions made about the two issues of time and money will make a huge dif-
ference throughout the implementation stage. In 1.3 I suggested that large-scale
changes would take upwards of five years of consistent effort to become institu-
tionalized. I also mentioned that for such consistent effort to be possible, policy
makers need to consider a large-scale educational-change project as a national
rather than a political responsibility, when agreeing on time scales and funding.
The implementation stage of the change process will be seriously undermined if
initiators have not committed themselves to funding the change over a realistic
time span, and agreed how funding and responsibilities will be divided between
national and local implementers.
Given that they are the funders and the initiators of change, national policy
makers will almost always wish to maintain an overview of how the change process
is progressing. Their responsibilities may take the form of a continuous change-
monitoring role, coupled with a role in agreeing on any policy adjustments to be
made in the light of the evidence of greater or lesser progress emerging from such
monitoring. They may also wish (or need) to play a role in ensuring materials or
high-stakes assessments are adjusted, or in the provision of appropriate profes-
sional development support for local administrators, teacher educators, teachers
and their leaders. Whatever roles policy makers choose to retain centrally, funding
needs to be allocated to enable them to carry them out over the many years of the
process.
The local planning, supporting, monitoring and institutional adjusting that
make up actual implementation in schools and their classrooms will of course take
place in a range of more or less different local and institutional environments. One
means of making it almost certain that the change implementation stage will be
viewed unenthusiastically at a local level is to obviously under-resource it. If funds
to support the local planning and implementation process over time are insuffi-
cient, local educational leaders have limited choices. While they can always
‘borrow’ funds allocated to other areas of their responsibility to subsidize the
change implementation process, this will make them unpopular with those
affected by cuts to other budgets. Overall though, serious shortage of funding will
only further complicate an already complex process and if funding is simply not
available local leaders may well decide to abandon part of the implementation
effort or simply give up completely, thus wasting most of the human and financial
investment that has already taken place.
Decisions made at the initiation stage will have far-reaching consequences for
the experiences of a great number of people. The next chapter supposes that policy
makers have made the decision to introduce a large-scale educational change. It
discusses some issues, relevant to leaders at all levels, that will influence the route
that implementation takes, and the rate at which/extent to which versions of
proposed change practices becomes visible in a majority of most classrooms.
Chapter 3
The implementation stage
Educational change depends on what a whole range of people who are more or less
directly involved actually do. If they are to do what the change expects them to do,
a degree of ‘reculturing’ is often needed. Within any national education system,
people work in differing contexts. If all of this is true, the starting point for change
implementation at any level must, I feel, include making decisions about:
what new practices (based on what new ‘beliefs) the national change
documents wish to ‘see’
what challenges these changes pose for people’s (not just teachers’) existing
practices and beliefs
whether the new change practices will need to be adapted to ‘fit’ the existing
context
what support people will need to become able to change their practices
appropriately
what information about the change needs to be communicated to whom, and
how to do this
what systems need to be set up locally to monitor the change process
The people most obviously and directly affected by the changes in practice that
most educational changes demand are teachers. However, teachers’ experiences of
the change implementation process will be influenced, for better or worse, by the
behaviour of many others within their local educational environment, including:
Local educational leaders/civil servants – representatives of the national

educational policy makers. They may hold the local funding for the change
process and are responsible for leading and managing the change process
within their administrative area. The extent to which they recognize how
national documents will need to be adjusted to match local contextual
realities, the need to communicate the change within their area and the need
to appropriately support teachers, may all affect teachers’ implementation

experiences more or less positively.
Institutional leaders – responsible for leading and managing change in
their schools. They are probably fund holders for any change budget allocated
to individual institutions. The extent to which, and manner in which, they
communicate with their teachers, and the efforts that they are willing to
make to try and ensure that the school environment is supportive to teachers’
attempts to adjust their practices, will directly affect their teachers.
Teacher educators – responsible for providing teachers with formal and
informal opportunities to develop the understandings and abilities needed to
begin to try out new practices in their classrooms. Their own understanding
of the changes and what they imply for teachers’ practices, together with
their professional understanding of how teachers’ learn, will critically
influence the value of the support they are able to give.
Colleagues – who may also be trying to implement new practices (unless the
change applies to only some curriculum subjects) can be an important sources
of day to day support to each other.
Learners – may be having to learn new ways of behaving ‘as a learner’, and
their attitude towards having to do so can be more or less helpful for their
teachers.
Parents and the wider community – may have to adjust some of their
expectations about what their children do in school. Their attitude is likely
to influence their children’s (learners’) attitudes, and so indirectly affect
teachers and institutional leaders.
All of these people have more or less active roles to play in the implementation
process. The greater the consistency in the manner in which they approach their
own aspects of the process, the more likely it is that teachers will feel that they are
adequately prepared and supported, and so feel willing and able to try to do their
best in the classroom.
3.1 Matching change to local realities
Although I have said that most large-scale change processes remain top down,
their implementation is not a neat, rational and uniform process of simply using
the resources that have been made available to apply the change practices iden-
tically in every school. How could it be when so many different people in so many
different places are involved? Institutions in any national education system vary.
This means that even where policy makers invest in consulting/communicating
widely at the initiation stage on the need for change and the form it should take,
and in identifying important features of the educational reality into which it will
be introduced, classroom outcomes will not be identical.
Schools may vary due to their geographical location (close to or far from the
main population centres, with good or poor transport links) or due to local socio-
economic factors (the prosperity or poverty resulting from growing or declining
The implementation stage 31
sources of employment). They may vary in terms of the cultural homogeneity of

their learners, who may represent one or several or many cultural backgrounds.
Such variations may affect perceptions of the value of education among parents, the
types of teachers and school leaders that the area attracts and manages to keep, and
the class sizes and quality of educational infrastructure that are commonly found.
Any combination of these may affect the extent and/or type of ‘reculturing’ that
implementation of a national educational change entails. This makes it highly
likely that local change leaders will need to adjust aspects of national change
policy to make it appropriate for local implementation.
If this is so, what does this suggest about the nature of change implementation?
First, it suggests that it is not a uniform process. It looks different in different
places. It is carried out at different speeds. It is carried out to differing degrees of
conformity to the official documents. So its ultimate outcomes will look different.
There is nothing that can be done about this. As a result, if the education system as
a whole is to benefit from the implementation process, national policy makers need
to explicitly encourage local leaders to begin their implementation stage by
introducing a version of the change that is true to the ‘spirit’ of what is being
attempted while also being appropriate for the majority of their schools. I believe
that taking such a flexible approach makes it more likely that more change will be
visible in more classrooms than will be the case if all contexts are pressured to
implement the new practices identically. To begin with, some change is better
than none, and trying to force a square peg into a round hole cannot work.
How then can a national change be adjusted to ‘match’ a local reality? What
factors need to be considered? I return again to the idea of coherence and the need
for harmony between the proposed change and the change situation into which it
is to be introduced. In most countries, local representatives of the national edu-
cation authorities are likely to be responsible for planning and managing the
implementation process in their own area. If there has been insufficient con-
sultation and communication at the initiation stage, they themselves may of course
not fully understand what the change is trying to achieve. Even where they do
understand the reasons for the change and its goals, if there has been no encour-
agement to interpret these goals as appropriate for their context, they may feel that
they have to implement it according to ‘the book’. However, assuming that such
encouragement has been given, adjustments to local conditions will involve
looking at existing material resources and teaching practices and thinking how the
change can be adapted to allow implementation to begin in a manner that will
reflect at least some of the key principles at the heart of the change. Aspects of the
local context that are likely to be relevant include:
the teachers’ current practices – what they are familiar with and do well,
which new practices they are likely to find difficult
class sizes – whether these are likely to make the introduction of some new
practices difficult
resources and teaching materials – whether the new practices require use of
particular resources/teaching materials, and whether these are present in most
schools or could be provided
demands of high-stakes assessment – whether the content and format of

important national examinations support the introduction of new practices
provision of teacher development personnel and opportunities – whether
local teacher educators understand and will be able to provide appropriate
support in the new practices, or whether they will require trainer-training
awareness of, and a positive attitude to, new practices, and an understanding
of their rationales on the part of most institutional leaders
awareness of, and likely attitude towards, the new practices on the part of the
wider society in the area – the parents
money – how much funding is available for how long to pay for teacher
support, resources, adjusting class sizes, etc.
For a variety of historical, geographical and socio-economic reasons, each local

context will be at least slightly different in terms of some of the above bullet
points. If local change implementers try to match the change to their local context,
each such context will initially have its own more or less different version of
change being implemented. As discussed above, I believe that this is natural.
What matters most for the ultimate achievement of the change aims is that the
manner in which the implementation process is carried out in a particular area
takes account of the actual daily working realties of those who are expected to
introduce and use new practices in local classrooms – most centrally teachers (and
their learners). However appropriately change aims are adapted, teachers are
almost certain to need support at the beginning of the implementation stage.
Means of providing such support are discussed in the next part of this chapter.
3.2 Support for learning the what and how of change
If much educational change involves a degree of personal/professional ‘reculturing’

for many of those affected by the process, then it is important to get a sense of
what this term means. All education systems have a ‘culture’, by which I mean
they have a usually longstanding and widely agreed way of thinking about the
meaning of terms like ‘education’ or ‘knowledge’ or ‘teaching’ or ‘learning’.
Simplifying a complex idea, it is possible to conceptualize any educational culture
as being situated at a particular point along one or more continua. To illustrate,
continua representing four possible characteristics of any educational culture,
adapted from Hofstede (1994), are shown in Figure 3.1. Following Young and Lee
(1984), I label the two ends of each continuum ‘transmission based’ and ‘inter-
pretation based’, but of course as mentioned in chapter 1, few educational cultures
are consistently situated at either extreme.
Figure 3.1 Four possible characteristics of educational culture

Transmission based Interpretation based
What knowledge is
Knowledge is clearly defined _____________ Knowledge is dynamic and is
and there is one right answer arrived at through discussion
to almost any question.
The purpose of
education
The purpose of education is to _____________ The purpose of education is to
learn knowledge learn how to learn
Learners
Learners are members of a _____________ Learners are a collection of
group and speak only when individuals who are expected
spoken to to express themselves
Teachers
Teachers are the initiators of _____________ Teachers are there to support
classroom activity and should learners’ participation in the
know all the answers learning process and can admit
ignorance
What might an implementation stage that expected teachers to move from
the practices and beliefs typical of a transmission-based culture towards
those of an interpretation based culture actually demand of a teacher?
What changes to existing ways of thinking and behaving might a teacher
need to learn?
What support would a teacher need?
New ways of behaving might include:
using a more varied range of teaching approaches, including ones that

involve learners in interaction and discussion
developing a different classroom atmosphere in which learners feel
encouraged to make contributions
using a wider range of materials that will provide learners with a range of
different points of view
In the long run, successful use of such new practices would hopefully result in
changes to beliefs that might include recognizing:
that even though one is a teacher one does not always need to know the
answer to everything
that in a classroom there is more than one right answer to many questions
that learners can usefully contribute to their own learning
The above changes to behaviour and (eventually) beliefs provide a sense of what
reculturing might entail for a teacher trying to implement a complex educational
change. Such a reculturing process can, as mentioned in chapter 1, make people

feel uncomfortable and concerned about their professional identity. If teachers (and
learners) are to be able to ‘reculture’ in this way they need support from each other,
from their institutional leaders and from local educational administrators. I look at
some aspects of successful support next.
One feature still common to most educational cultures worldwide is that tea-
chers spend almost all their time alone in their classrooms with their learners and
(once qualified) are rarely, if ever, observed teaching by anyone else. Most teachers
are not expected to and so are not used to sharing pedagogy. In many contexts they
have few regular opportunities to spend time discussing professional issues during
their working day. Evidence from educational change contexts suggests that in
this respect there needs to be a major reculturing of almost every education system,
since the value of sharing, collaboration and team work is repeatedly emphasized
in discussions of how teachers can be supported in implementing change.
Developing confidence in new practices takes time. To begin with, most tea-
chers will probably only be able to see the reform goals through the lenses of their
existing beliefs and understandings. For example, in a change process that involves
a move away from a transmission-based educational culture, participants who are
used to thinking of educational knowledge as mainly a series of facts may begin
the change implementation process thinking that the change will involve the
learning and teaching of new and different facts. For them to move to an
understanding that this is not so, and then to develop confidence in their personal
ability to behave in a different manner, will be a long-term process. The exact
stages of this process will be different for each individual. However, for teachers,
simply put, in some form or another it probably involves:
(a) developing a deep understanding of what the change aims mean for
classroom practice and why they are worth introducing
(b) using their current level of understanding (with or without more expert
help) to plan how to introduce new practices
(c) trying out new practices with learners in a classroom
(d) seeing what happens when doing so – obtaining explicit or implicit
feedback from learners, colleagues or a more expert ‘coach’ (Joyce and
Showers 1988)
(e) going through many more cycles of (a) to (d), slowly developing a more
complete personal understanding and personal confidence in practice
through carrying it out again and again
These simple words of course hide just what a difficult process ‘changing’ really is.
In addition, the above simple sequence stands a much better chance of working if
other important people in the change process (administrators, school leaders and
teacher educators) are simultaneously following a similar sequence and have
appropriate opportunities to:
share understandings of the changes as they affect their roles and settings
receive more or less formal help in planning the leadership/management of
implementation (see section 3)
try out their plans with the people for whom they are responsible
remain alert and open to available feedback from inside and outside the
classroom
Harvey (1999), looking at teachers trying to implement a new model of teaching

science in their own classrooms in South Africa, suggested these teachers needed at
least 20–25 supported cycles at (b) to (d) above to develop confidence in carrying
out practices that represented a change of only medium complexity. He noted that
throughout this time their commitment to the change was not very strong and if
support was not available they were always likely to revert to their pre-existing
practices. In Harvey’s case an educational ‘expert’ provided one-to-one support.
Such intense support is unlikely to be available for so many practice cycles in most
implementation contexts, but the acknowledgement of the need does help explain
the recent rise in the perceived usefulness of mentoring schemes in educational
change contexts. Given that people and the contexts that they work in are so
different, it is not possible to quantify exactly how much support people need. It is
though clear that the greater the reculturing, the longer support will be needed
for.
The form that support for teachers takes matters greatly. This is particularly
true of any formal training provided, since such training usually happens only once
and does not last for long. Situation 3 below is an example of a formal change
implementation support attempt that I was responsible for providing many years
ago when (as I now know) I knew very little:
Situation 3
A new language-teaching textbook was about to be launched in a broadly transmission-
based educational culture. It was significantly different from the textbooks that were
currently in use. It claimed to enable learners to develop their communication skills in
the language, especially listening and speaking. It stressed the need to provide learners
with opportunities to interact and so used a lot of group and pair work, emphasized the
encouragement of fluency rather than being constantly concerned with accuracy,
encouraged teachers to make their own choices about the order in which they used (or
even whether they used) the various activities, and assessed performance through
‘communicative tests’. The existing language-learning materials that teachers were
familiar with were reading based and emphasized total comprehension through the
sentence-by-sentence study of each sentence’s grammar and vocabulary.
To introduce teachers to the new materials, a two-week training programme was
provided. This spent a lot of time explaining the theory behind the approach taken in
the materials. It introduced teachers to the very detailed teachers’ book, and the trainer
used materials from the book to demonstrate some of the new pedagogic practices that
teachers using the book would need to develop. Teachers were then each given a chance
to teach a very short part of a unit from the book themselves in front of their colleagues
and the tutors and received feedback. They then went back to their institutions where
they were supposed to start to use the new books.
Have you ever participated in any capacity in a similar short training course
that aimed to prepare teachers to implement a change in their classrooms?
If you have, do you feel it was successful? What affected how successful it
was?
Do you see any weaknesses in the above training course, in terms of its
ability to support teachers’ understanding of, and confidence in, imple-
menting new practices?
I feel that the main weaknesses include the following:
the course was not balanced in the time it spent on ‘theory’ and ‘practice’
the training made no attempt to find out ‘where the teachers are now’ – to
identify their existing practices and beliefs, and the contexts that they
worked in, and to use these as a starting point to discuss the new practices
the teachers had no opportunity to practise in their real working
environment
I comment on each of these weaknesses here, drawing widely on Malderez and

Wedell (2007), which covers most issues raised in far greater detail.
Theory is easier to teach than to practice. Talking about the academic rationale
for the change allows trainers to adopt the lecture mode that is often the form of
teaching practice that they are most familiar and comfortable with. Using this
mode means they can avoid showing that they themselves are perhaps not very
confident about the practices they are urging others to use. However, although
such behaviour might be more comfortable for trainers, if the figure of 20–25
practice cycles cited above is even approximately right, providing opportunities for
participants to see the new practices in action and practise them themselves in
their own classrooms or work environments is very important. The design of
implementation training programmes needs to try to provide an appropriate
balance between telling teachers about change and enabling them to experience it.
Any formal support for change implementation is likely to be fairly short lived.
It may last a few days, a week, a few weeks at most. Its impact on participants’
understanding of what the change means for them will be a great deal more
powerful if it begins by helping people identify some of the existing principles and
practices that guide their work and the constraints that affect them, and to
compare these to the principles and practices introduced by the change. Personal
and contextual issues revealed as possibly hindering the implementation of change
practices provide a starting point for trainers and participants to make decisions
about how best to use the limited training time. If trainers do not really know
what teachers’ ideas and concerns are, how can they know whether what they are
doing is in fact what teachers will find useful?
Change implementation usually involves people altering aspects of their
familiar professional practice. If at all possible, it makes sense for them to begin
trying to do so in their normal work setting, since it is here that they will be most
concerned about performing well. Real practice opportunities of this kind during a
formal training can provide participants with chances to see what happens when
they try to implement change in their classroom. The training environment also
provides a supportive setting in which to discuss their early implementation
experiences with colleagues who are trying to do the same, while still having access
to a (hopefully) more expert trainer. This is not to say that all formal support for a
change process should be institution based. However, the value of the training
outlined in situation 3 would have been greater if the structure of the programme
had been designed to enable participants to spend time using the new materials in
their own institutions between perhaps two periods of formal training.
Formal training courses are of course just the beginning of a support process.
During the early years of an implementation process, teachers (and institutional
leaders and administrators) in a particular local or institutional context all need
regular opportunities to interact with others in similar roles. Ideally, most of this
interaction will be with colleagues having very similar change experiences in their
shared institutional context, but ideally people also need chances to meet others
trying to carry out the same change in other institutions.
If people need repeated and supported cycles of practice and feedback to develop
confidence in new practices, provision needs to be made for such cycles to be
provided within their work settings, together with some sort of support. Since
one-to-one ‘expert’ support for every teacher going through a national change
process will never be available, most support will have to come from within
people’s own institutions. These need to become ‘professional learning commu-
nities’ (Fullan 2007) in which there is an atmosphere of shared learning or peer
mentoring (Malderez and Wedell 2007, Malderez and Bodoszcky 1999) in how to
implement the change practices. In such a community teachers regularly have the
opportunity, for example, to meet to discuss their experiences of trying to
implement new practices, possibly agree an observation rota, and share strategies
and materials. To begin with at least, such meetings need to be focused and led by
a facilitator. This person might be a ‘vanguard teacher’ from within the institu-
tion, who (perhaps due to attending a formal training course and having had some
training for the mentor-like role) feels that they are clearer about the change aims
and practices than most colleagues, or a local teacher educator provided by the
local education administrators.
An important responsibility of local implementation planners is therefore to
enable such meetings to become an established part of the implementation stage in
most institutions. They will also need to be scheduled in school hours, so that they
are not perceived as being ‘just more extra work’. How long such meetings will be
needed for will of course vary, but the atmosphere of sharing and mutual aid
during the implementation stage may be something positive that teachers and
institutional leaders wish to retain even once the urgent need has passed, in which
case this may represent yet another reculturing effect of the change process.
A coherent programme of formal and informal support for teachers’ change
implementation at local level is unlikely to happen of its own accord. Good change
leadership at all levels is critical, and this is discussed next.
3.3 Leading (local) change
Whereas 3.2 dealt principally with teachers, here I discuss the role of local-level
change leaders, who are likely to be the educational administrators/civil servants
charged with managing implementation in their area, and the leaders of the
various institutions that they are responsible for. It could be argued that their role
at the implementation stage is the most difficult of all. After all, they are expected
both to lead and support others (teachers) through an educational reculturing
process, and to simultaneously reculture elements of their own organization and/or
their own role, in order to be able to do so.
Leaders need to understand the extent to which their local educational culture
‘fits’ the classroom behaviours that change implementation implies, in order to be
able to decide whether and how national policy needs to be locally adjusted. They
also have to consider what the need to develop a ‘professional learning community’
to support the implementation stage implies for the organizational culture in
which they work and for their own leadership practices.
The management structure of the organization is
A steep hierarchy, with a A simple flat hierarchy

clearly defined leader and a The leader is first among
vertical, top down, chain of equals.
command.
Staff at lower levels are not _____________ Use of individual initiative and
expected to show initiative. discretion is encouraged.
Organization is seen as a Organization is conceived and

number of separate planned for as a whole.
departments.
The organization values staff for
Their ability to contribute Their ability to cooperate and

their specialist knowledge of a share information.
particular field to the ______________ Their ability to obtain and act
organisation. on information gained from
internal and external sources.
The organization’s attitude to change is to
View stability as the norm. Assume change and instability

Respond slowly to the need for to be the norm.
change. ______________ Recognize need for, and be
Feel uncomfortable with the keen to, develop the skills to
notion of continuous cope with continuous
innovation. innovation in an unstable
world.
Figure 3.2 Some features of organizational cultures (adapted from Wedell 2000)
Organizational cultures, like educational cultures, may be thought of as being

situated at points along a range of continua that reflect underlying assumptions
about how the organization works and about the roles of the people within it.
Figure 3.2 above illustrates what I mean by looking at how three aspects of an
organizational culture may vary.
In many contexts, the organizational culture in both local government
departments and schools traditionally tends to be towards the left-hand column
above. If you think back to the discussion of implementation so far, I hope you
will agree that leaders and staff in an organizational culture with these char-
acteristics are unlikely to be flexible enough to cope with the demands of the
implementation stage that I have mentioned. Leaders’ personal reculturing may
therefore be seen as needing to precede that of teachers, since without the
development of new leadership practices it may not even be possible to start to
provide the supportive environment within which teachers can begin to imple-
ment an educational change.
What new practices (and beliefs) do educational leaders who are trying to move
the culture of their offices or institutions from a position nearer the left of Figure
3.2 to one nearer the right need to develop? I believe that they include those
bulleted below:
recognizing that change is going to be a long-term (if not permanent) feature

of people’s daily working life, and that therefore organizational systems need
to become more flexible
developing an organizational atmosphere in which individuals feel
encouraged to contribute their ideas about how to support the change process
and take personal initiative
developing new channels of communication within and between schools and
offices in order to share the ‘burden’ of change, and learn from each other’s
experiences of trying to implement it
developing ways of helping their staff feel as comfortable as possible with the
new administrative, organizational and teaching practices that change will
demand
actively encouraging their staff to cooperate in developing their
understanding of and confidence in new practices.
What personal qualities and skills do leaders need to have to be able to suc-
cessfully support the reculturing of their organization and their staff to meet the
unpredictable challenges of an implementation stage? First and obviously they
themselves need to fully understand (and hopefully also believe in the value of) the
change aims, in order to identify what these mean for their organization, and to be
able to help their staff understand and believe in them too. Without such a
comprehensive understanding, it will be very difficult for any leader to know how
to adjust the detail of the implementation to meet their institutional realities
while still retaining the spirit of the change.
However fully a leader understands the change, is able to communicate that
understanding and use it to make the expected new practices realistic within the
school environment, some teachers are still likely to find reculturing threatening.
They have a whole range of possible issues relating to their ‘key meanings’ (see 1.3)
that might worry them: whether they will ever be able to feel as comfortable with
the new practices as they do with the existing ones, whether their learners will
suffer from their initial unfamiliarity with the new practices, whether their status
with parents or their position in the institution or the community will be
diminished. Any of these, when added to the extra work that even the best planned
and led change implementation entails, may lead teachers to feel that making the
effort to change is not worthwhile.
A second important quality for leaders is therefore the need to understand
people; to understand that people react differently to change, and that a leader
needs to be sympathetic to teachers’ anxiety and stress about learning and trying to
implement new classroom practices. It is leaders who have to help their staff see
that change is achievable, by trying to notice and celebrate individual and group
successes. It is leaders who have to help people see that change can offer profes-
sional and personal opportunities as well as make demands; opportunities to
collaborate with colleagues, to learn to carry out their teaching differently and so
refresh their professional life (Oplatka 2005), opportunities to increase professional
confidence and satisfaction through the successful implementation of new prac-
tices, and most importantly opportunities to have positive effects on learners.
Just as I have argued that national policy makers need to try to maximize
involvement in decision making at the initiation stage, so leaders need to try to
develop an organizational culture in which change implementation is felt to be a
venture that involves everybody (the idea of the professional learning community
again). Leaders cannot do everything, so they need to be prepared to delegate, and
develop an institutional culture in which it becomes normal for everyone to be
involved in decisions about how the change should be implemented and mon-
itored in their institutions, and about whether and how the results of such
monitoring should be used to adjust the institutional implementation process.
The atmosphere in such an institution will be one in which people who disagree
with aspects of implementation, or even of the change practices themselves, will
feel confident enough to say so, and know that adjustments will be made to the
implementation process if their reasons are agreed to be valid. In such an insti-
tutional culture people will be able to feel that they have some control over how
the change will affect them.
The leaders’ role is central to almost every aspect of implementation. In their
own institutions, leaders represent the ‘bridge’ between a national policy and how
it is experienced by implementers – their staff. They have to try and support their
staff through their reculturing processes, while at the same time going through
their own, and, in many contexts, being expected to provide their superiors with
progress reports on their implementation process. They need the self-confidence to
cope with the different speeds at which people are able to change their practices,
not to panic at the inevitable problems that will arise during the implementation
stage, and not to be tempted to hurry teachers along just for the sake of appearing
to be changing. They need to be able to cope with lack of certainty, be willing to
take responsibility for failures as well as credit staff with successes, and be willing
to provide an atmosphere within their institution that supports the collaboration

and mutual aid among teachers, which I have said above is an essential feature of
supporting change. Few leaders begin any change implementation process with
such a wide range of personal and professional qualities already in place.
While it is has long been recognized, however incoherently, that teachers need
support in order to change, it is only now beginning to be recognized that change
leaders also need support for their own reculturing. Since their needs are so wide-
ranging, formal training for leaders in educational change contexts remains rare.
They (like teachers) do though have one potential source of support available: each
other. In addition, therefore, to establishing structures to support teachers and to
enable them to support each other, leaders within a local area also need to use some
of their funding to set up their own support systems. These can help them to share
their understandings of the local change process, and perhaps visit or host visits
from leaders at similar levels in other areas to find new information about/discuss
problems and solutions for leading implementation.
A local change leader’s role is very difficult. They will vary greatly in the speed
with which, and the extent to which, they are able to support the implementation
stage in the many ways that I suggest they need to. I feel that the most that can be
expected is that leaders are seen to be trying to create an environment in which
people feel that new practices are supported. That this support may initially be
partial and imperfect is, I feel, inevitable.
3.4 Implementation: Conclusion
It is impossible to list all the variables that those responsible for leading the local
implementation of a large-scale educational change process need to bear in mind.
Some of the most important are that:
the extent of its success depends on the behaviour and attitudes of a very
wide range of individuals
as many of these people as possible need to understand the rationale for, and
main aims of, the change to appropriate degrees of detail
for this widespread understanding to be possible, serious consideration needs
to be given to awareness-raising and communication between the various
levels of the change process
people do not respond to change purely rationally, they have feelings, and
consequently the implementation process at a national, local or institutional
level is almost certain to be unpredictable
the change practices may need adjusting to meet the realities of local or
institutional human and material resources
the implementation process will last for years. Given its unpredictability, it
needs to be monitored at all levels to try to ensure that what is actually
happening remains directed towards the spirit of the change aims, while at
the same time being practically achievable in a range of different contexts
given the range of contexts, the implementation process will never be
uniform. It will look different, proceed at different speeds and follow

different routes in different institutions
change often requires a degree of professional reculturing both in terms of
approaches to teaching and learning practices, and of the manner in which
different levels of organization are led
the introduction of new practices requires support over time
the provision of formal and informal support may in turn require formal or
informal support for the trainers and leaders whose responsibility it is
the implementation process therefore needs consistent funding over time
the new practices need to be in harmony with available teaching and learning
materials, and most importantly with national high-stakes assessment
In the light of complicated interrelationships even just among the many variables
included in this long list, it will probably not surprise you to read the following:
I can produce many examples of how educational practices could look dif-
ferent, but I can produce few, if any, examples of large numbers of teachers
engaging in these practices in large scale institutions designed to deliver
education to most children. (Elmore 1995: 11 in Fullan 2007)
The next chapter looks at some of the most common reasons why this is so often
the case.
Chapter 4
Why educational changes fail
Massive financial and human resources are devoted to trying to improve education
worldwide. Some improvements, for example providing access to primary edu-
cation for a larger proportion of the population, or improving the proportion of
the school population who obtain five GCSEs or A grades at A level (taking a UK
example), can be quantified. Evidence suggests that improvements whose aim is to
offer an existing educational content and process to more people, or to improve
how it is offered as measured by learners’ performance in high-stakes assessment,
can sometimes succeed in meeting their hoped-for outcomes. When they do, the
successful change is usually loudly celebrated by educational policy makers and in
the media.
In contrast, efforts to try to change the process of what actually happens in
classrooms nationwide, with the aim of enabling learners to develop differently
and so better meet their educational needs in a rapidly changing world, have
usually been far less successful. In this chapter I suggest a number of important
reasons for this sad truth, most of which can be traced back to ignorance or lack of
care at the initiation stage.
4.1 Insufficient understanding of what change is like
The success of any educational change depends on the reactions of a large number
of different people in different contexts. However, at the initiation stage when
policy makers are making decisions about what changes to try to implement, and
how to do so, the tendency remains for change implementation to be viewed as a
purely rational process. Too many change initiatives still begin from a position
that seems to assume that successful implementation is simply a matter of pro-
viding money and resources and implementation plans and saying, ‘We expect this
change to happen’, ‘We expect it to happen like this’, ‘We expect it to begin on
this date’, and then waiting for the desired change to appear identically in every
classroom.
The policy makers and academic ‘experts’ who are so often the only ones actually
involved at the initiation stage still seem to emphasize the technicality of change
(Goodson 2003) – the visible resources and systems that need to be available or
established – over the ‘personality of change’, the existing practices and beliefs of
all the people who will be affected. This leads to the following ‘fundamental
strategic flaw’:
The fundamental flaw in most innovators’ strategies is that they focus on

their innovations, on what they are trying to do – rather than on under-
standing how the larger culture, structures and norms will react to their
efforts. (Senge et al. 1999: 26 in Fullan 2007)
Consequently, in many cases, those involved in initiation continue to believe that

their role is merely to draft ‘correct’ and technically feasible plans for imple-
menting the changes, with little or no need to consider the people who will be
carrying them out, or the contexts in which they will be doing so. This simplistic
approach to the initiation stage is even more extreme in cases where politicians,
looking for quick solutions to educational challenges that they see their own
countries facing, decide to just borrow educational change solutions ‘off the shelf’
from education systems in other countries (Riley 2003), without considering in
what ways their educational realities may be different. This tendency has been
particularly common in, but not unique to, changes in approaches to English
language education over the last two decades or so.
In such initiation situations, where, in the policy makers’ eyes, the change
documents are the change, there is clearly little encouragement to local leaders to
be flexible at the implementation stage. In addition, since little effort (beyond
transmission of official documents and/or oral presentation) is made to ensure that
local-level administrators fully understand what the change is trying to achieve,
they are unlikely to feel capable of adjusting change aims to match their local
reality. With little or no information about the change other than what is written
in the documents, local leaders have little choice but to pass on the ‘orders’ to the
institutional leaders, who, equally unclear, pass them on to teachers to implement.
Such a ‘communication’ process is not supportive for teachers’ perceptions of how
much their leaders value the change (‘The leaders asked us to change because it was
a task from the upper leaders. They know no better about the change than the
teachers’ (Wedell forthcoming)), or for their own understanding of it (‘No further
and detailed explanation relevant to the change was given by the institutional
leadership’ (Wedell op. cit.)) In such circumstances the hoped-for new practices are
unlikely to find their way into most classrooms.
4.2 Blindness to the existing educational culture and teaching-

learning conditions
I find it difficult to understand how so many policy makers and their educational
experts can remain so blind to their own educational cultures. The focus of their
Why educational changes fail 45
policy making is on introducing change to their education systems. To me this

presupposes that a system already exists. However, it often seems that the existing
education system and the existing cultural assumptions about education in the
wider society remain invisible to policy makers, and so are disregarded in their
decision-making.
Consequently, at national level educational-change policy makers and planners
often seem able to delude themselves that it is not necessary to think about how the
people affected by implementation will react to change, or about how the imple-
mentation process might be affected by the existing classroom conditions. Local or
institutional leaders are of course much closer to change implementation. If they
follow their superiors and ignore local realities, they will find it more difficult to
avoid the unsatisfactory outcomes that are likely to follow. Sakui (2004), discussing
educational change in Japan, points to some concrete examples of how teachers might
be affected by a top-down educational change that makes no concessions to people
and places. This change involved a new curriculum with hoped-for outcomes that
required the introduction of different practices. Some of the, no doubt unintended,
effects on people and practices of an initiation stage that planned change while
ignoring existing realities, which were identified by this study, are listed below:
The change causes teachers to worry, because it expects them to use new
practices that require a different classroom management style. Behaviours
and interactions typical of this style contradict existing beliefs about the
appropriate roles and behaviours of teachers and learners. There may be
problems in terms of discipline and noise.
The change may make it difficult to plan classes to the usual degree of detail
because new activities are more open-ended in their outcomes and/or the
preparation for such activities is very time consuming. Both the open-
endedness and the lack of detailed preparation for each lesson may make
teachers (and learners) uneasy.
The change requires more use of more time-consuming, open-ended,
activities. This may make it difficult to adhere to the widespread and
longstanding convention that in institutions of a particular type, the
textbook for each subject is finished within one academic year, in time for
what has been learned in that textbook to be assessed at the end of year. This
may lead learners, school leaders and parents to evaluate teachers negatively.
The introduction of new classroom activities and classroom management
styles by teachers who do not feel confident about what they are doing may
lead to dissatisfaction among students, school leaders (and their parents)
because new practices and classroom activities are not immediately
recognizable as ‘proper work’.
As I have said repeatedly, in such circumstances, if local administrators and

institutional leaders are unable to:
provide a comprehensible rationale for the change (not just that provided in
official documents)
help teachers see how the practice of the change may be adapted to take
account of their classroom realities, while still maintaining (some of) the
spirit of the change
establish systems that provide support for the teachers during the long
process of developing confidence in the new practices
then one understandable response for teachers will be to ignore the changes that
they are supposed to be implementing and to and carry on as usual.
It is rare to hear of national policy makers seriously investigating reasons why an
educational-change initiative does not ultimately lead to any of the hoped-for
changes to classroom practises. If they make any public statements at all regarding
an unsuccessful change attempt, it is even more rare to hear them admit that
reasons for failure have anything to do with their own poor policy making. Instead
it is customary to blame teachers for their inability to understand and/or imple-
ment new practices. Policy makers’ self-delusion continues, nothing has been
learned, people working within local education systems become yet more cynical
about change initiatives, and any further changes will be welcomed with even less
enthusiasm.
4.3 Pretending or appearing to change
Given the hierarchical nature of most education systems, it is of course often

difficult for teachers or their institutions to completely ignore demands that they
should change that come down from higher levels. A common alternative to
simply ignoring a change that is felt to be impossible to implement is therefore to
simplify the change to the extent that it no longer actually constitutes a change.
This may be done by leaders insisting that teachers use the language of change (for
example, learner centred, learning strategies, communication) in any public perfor-
mances and written documents, or that they adopt whatever new materials the
change process expects them to use. At a surface level, the institution and the
people within it seem to have changed. They may even think themselves that they
have changed. They, for example, use the new textbook, which says on the cover
that it is learner centred and that it caters for learners’ different learning styles, or
they use power-point presentations in all their classes. However, if looked at more
closely it is clear that the hoped-for aims of the change in terms of practices that
might encourage different learning outcomes have barely been touched. Teachers
do use the textbook, but they miss out the activities that would involve them in
introducing new practices to their classroom, they do use power point, but the
content is only the notes they would previously have written on the board.
This state of people appearing to change, or thinking that they have changed,
when in fact they have only assimilated some of the jargon and perhaps techniques
of change into what they have always done without really understanding why,
Fullan has called ‘false clarity’. This term too has appeared in the last three editions
of his book (1991, 2001, 2007), which again suggests that the phenomenon
remains widespread. Claxton notices a very similar phenomenon:
It is not uncommon for example for people to say that they have changed, and
even to think that they have changed, but for that change not have affected
what they do very much at all. (Claxton 1989: 19)
Whether local leaders or teachers consciously ignore changes that they are expected
to implement, or unconsciously assimilate the surface manifestations of the change
practices and language into their existing practice, classrooms change very little.
Surprisingly, policy makers often appear unconcerned about whether changes have
been superficially or more deeply absorbed. The documents at all levels of the
system state that change has been introduced, new teaching materials or ways of
presenting teaching materials are being used, the illusion of change exists.
However, the hoped-for outcomes of the change are not achieved.
Conclusion to section 1
So what conclusions about educational change is it possible to draw from this

section of the book?
Any national educational change will have to take account of a great many
interrelated variables in different local environments. I divide them into three
broad interconnected categories, whose variables may influence the change process
in a particular national or local context to differing degrees at different stages of
that process. The categories are:
the material conditions into which the change is to be introduced. Are they
broadly compatible with the behaviours and activities that the change hopes
to promote?
the existing experiences and educational culture of the people whom the
change will affect. What degree and manner of reculturing will be needed/is
feasible to make actual implementation possible?
the existing ‘organizational culture’ of the institutions at every level of the
system. What reculturing will be needed for each level to be able to
communicate, support and lead the change adequately?
Some variables in each category are shown in Figure 4.1.

How the above variables interact over time within a particular level of an
educational setting will affect the rate, route and eventual outcome of the change
process. Ideally those leading change implementation will understand how to
focus on the right variables at the right time to the right extent for the context
that they are working in. Since what is ‘right’ at one stage of the process may not
be so at a different stage, constant monitoring of implementation will be needed
together with the confidence to respond flexibly to the information emerging from
such monitoring. In most contexts, change leadership training is likely to be
needed if leaders are to understand their complex roles.
I have suggested that top-down, largely power coercive, strategies that assume
that change implementation will occur merely because national policy makers have
_______________________________ TIME _______________________________

Change Initiation Implementation Institutionalization
decided that it is necessary do not seem to work. What more successful approach to
initiation and implementation planning might national policy makers adopt? As
suggested in chapter 2.1, a combination of top-down and bottom-up strategies
may be an answer.
Such a combination might be imagined as beginning with top-down national
policy makers who understand that the decisions that they make about new
practices at the initiation and national implementation planning stages will in fact
need to be carried out in many local contexts. Policy makers therefore involve
representatives of as many different levels as possible in decision making early on,
and provide support/training that will enable critical local-change agents (local
educational administrators, school leaders and teacher trainers) to develop as full
an understanding as possible of how change practices will affect local teachers and
schools. When planning for implementation, policy makers support local change
leaders in making their own detailed local plans for how to implement the new
practices in a manner that takes local contextual variables into account. What
might the stages of such a process look like in practice? Table 4.1 suggests an
approach that tries to incorporate most of the issues that have been identified as
important in this section of the book.
Table 4.1 One approach to initiating a national educational change
National policy makers (NPM) Local planners/leaders

National coordinating body (NCB)
CHANGE-INITIATION STAGE
(a) NPMs begin by agreeing that the change
should be seen as a national (not a political)
initiative. All political groups commit to a minimum
of ten years of national leadership and funding before a
decisive evaluation.
(b) NPMs recognize the need to fully develop
their own understanding of the what and why of
the desired change, and of how it might be begun
in their national context.
NPMs recognize whom change implementation
will directly or indirectly affect.
(c) NPMs agree how responsibilities for change
leadership will be divided between national and
local levels, leaving open the possibility of
changes over time.
(d) NPMs establish a national level coordinating
body (NCB) to provide/coordinate active national
leadership.
Members include representatives of policy makers
and all affected groups appointed for five years.
NPMs arrange professional change leadership
training for members.
(f) NCB plans how to publicize the main rationale
for/features of change to wider society. Such
awareness-raising to be continued as appropriate
throughout the initiation and implementation planning
stages.
(g) NCB convenes national meetings to introduce the change, its rationale and its
implications for current practice to representatives from all groups likely to be directly
affected. NCB members remain open to responses, suggestions and concerns.
(h) NCB arranges local briefings for local change
leaders from institutional leaders upwards, to
introduce all aspects of change itself, and the
leaders’ roles as local planners and supporters of
the implementation process.
(i) NCB arranges appropriate professional change
leadership training.
(j) NCB prepares a draft plan of the proposed
national/local monitoring systems for the change.
Sends copies to local leaders for comment and to

guide their local implementation planning.
(k) Introduce and discuss the
change with teachers in their
areas, and identify commonly
occurring responses, suggestions
and concerns.
(l) Introduce and discuss the
change with local teacher trainers,
highlighting issues raised by
teachers at (k).
Assess trainers’ existing capacity
to meet teachers’ training needs.
Report back to NCB.
(m) NCB considers trainer capacity reports from
local areas.
Arranges trainer-training as necessary, using
expert nationals as far as possible.
If national trainer-training capacity not available,
consider use of international expertise.
If no access to expertise possible, reconsider change goals
in light of teacher-training capacity that is available.
Go back to (g).
(n) NCB coordinates pre-implementation
trainer-training.
Works with trainers to agree on/arrange
implementation training for at least some trainers
to develop mentoring and facilitation skills for
their future roles as facilitators of ongoing
teacher-support processes.
(o) Work (possibly with leaders
from other adjoining areas) to
draft local plans for
implementation.
Plans to cover:
support provision for teachers pre-
implementation;
support provision for teachers
during implementation;
systems to enable monitoring of
implementation in each
institution.
Local awareness-raising.
(p) Discuss plans with local

institutional leaders, teacher
trainers and teachers and adjust in
the light of their responses.
(q) Manage/coordinate local
pre-implementation teacher
training.
(r) NCB meets local leaders’ representatives for final discussions of what experience so far
suggests about the form of change that it is feasible to implement in most schools and
agree final adjustments.
(s) Adjust local implementation
plans if necessary.
(t) NCB sets date for implementation to begin, in consultation with local leaders and
teacher trainers.
Recognizes that contextual differences mean not all areas/schools ready to same degree.
IMPLEMENTATION BEGINS
(u) NCB keeps a close check on monitoring and (u) Keep a close eye on local
communications systems during early months to monitoring and communications
ensure that experiences of implementation from systems to ensure that experiences
schools in all parts of the country are being of implementation from schools
collected and commonly occurring problems are in all parts of the area are being
being recognized. collected, and that commonly
occurring problems are
recognized and made the focus of
ongoing local teacher-support
sessions.
(v) After six to twelve months of implementation, (v) After six months of
NCB meets local leaders’ representatives to implementation, meet
consider: representatives of all local groups
involved to consider:
experiences of implementation so far;
whether these merit serious adjustments to the experiences of implementation so
national change aims or hoped-for outcomes; far;
whether there need to be further national whether these merit serious
initiatives to support the implementation process. adjustments to local
implementation plans;
Such meetings to continue annually (or more frequently) whether they need any further
for at least the first two or three years. local support for implementation
process.
Such meetings to continue at least
every six months for at least the first
two or three years.
(w) NCB and local leaders continue to actively lead local implementation towards
achieving national-change goals.
What does this approach show? The letters below relate to the letters next to
each stage above.
(a) The above approach takes a long-term view. I mention ten years as a time scale.
This would of course need to be considered in the circumstances, but the
important point I am trying to make is the need to remove educational change
policy from the short-term thinking that seems to afflict much politically moti-
vated national decision making (see chapter 2.3).
(a–d) The approach remains initially top down. I believe that for the foreseeable
future this will continue to be the case for all national educational-change
initiatives. However, in any context, the original national policy makers are
unlikely to be able to remain personally concerned with the leadership and
management of an educational change initiative over the length of the imple-
mentation time span.
(d onwards) Leadership and management of the detailed initiation and imple-

mentation planning is therefore delegated as soon as possible to a national coor-
dinating body (NCB), which contains representatives of policy makers and all
other affected groups (local educational administrators, institutional leaders, tea-
cher trainers, teachers and possibly even the public representing parents). In the
light of what I have said (see chapters 2.1 and 3.3), encouraging this broader
involvement at such an early stage would in itself represent a big culture change
for most national policy-making systems.
NCB remains responsible for national planning of the change for the agreed time
scale at (a) and for delegating responsibility for the detailed management and
implementation of the local-change process to local leaders as soon as appropriate
to ensure that local realties are considered (see chapter 3.1).
(f) NCB recognize the need to raise awareness of change in society at large.
(k onwards) Local leaders are encouraged to plan with their existing local contexts
in mind. (Examples of how this might be done are provided in section 3.)
Throughout the initiation and implementation planning process there is ongoing
communication between the NCB and local leadership, and there is real recog-
nition that details of the proposed change may need to be adjusted in the light of
local realities.
(d) and (i) The complexity of change leadership is recognized (see chapters 3.2.
and 3.3) and so change leadership training of NCB members and local change
leaders is considered.
(l) and (m) The critical role of teacher trainers is acknowledged and their training
too is part of the initiation stage. It is important to note that if trainer-training
cannot be provided, it will almost certainly be necessary to revisit the change aims.
(q–u) The need for teachers to be supported both before the implementation
begins and during its early stags is recognized and systems are established to
enable such support (see chapter 3.2).
(u) Change implementation only begins when everyone is more or less adequately
prepared. This suggests an initiation process that may itself take several years.
(u and v) Once implementation is under way, there is close monitoring at local

level. Good communication between local implementers and NCB ensures that
NCB has a fairly accurate picture of how the implementation process is pro-
gressing nationwide. Any adjustments that may need to be made can be based on
evidence of experience.
It can of course be argued that the approach suggested above is too rational and
makes far too many assumptions. It assumes that policy makers have a genuine
desire to ‘reculture’ the education system, rather than a desire for short-term
political advantage. It assumes substantial funding, consistent trust, good will and
enthusiasm from all participants at all levels, and consistent leadership at both
‘top’ and ‘bottom’ levels over time. It also assumes a national and/or international
environment that is stable enough over time to allow the change process to be
worked through. I know that none of these desirable states can necessarily be
assumed, and that therefore table 1 represents an ideal. Nonetheless, I believe that
the management and leadership of complex-change initiatives will need to begin
to incorporate locally appropriate versions of many of the ideas that Table 4.1
proposes, if their success rate is ever to increase.
This section of the book has introduced some important issues that influence
any educational-change process and tried to show how they might be incorporated
into an approach to change initiation that makes successful initial-change
implementation more likely. Section 2 examines three real-life examples of
educational-change initiatives in the light of these issues, and tries to show their
effects on the change processes and on the people working within them.
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Further reading
Most of those currently writing about educational change come from the English-
speaking world. Most of their examples therefore come from this world. English-
language teaching, because of its international reach, is one of the few areas to have
looked in any detail at how educational change has been and is being experienced
in a genuinely wide range of international contexts. I provide information about
possible further readings from this field of study after the case studies at the end of
section 2.
Journals
The specialist journal in the area is the Journal of Educational Change, which,
according to its website
investigates how men and women, older and younger teachers, students,
parents, and others experience change. It also examines the social, economic,
cultural, and political forces driving educational change. While presenting
the positive aspects of change, the journal raises many challenging questions
about educational change as well.
This is the only journal I know concerned entirely with discussions of educational
change, across the whole area from strategy/policy to human experience.
Other journals that I have found useful because they sometimes include articles
relevant to various aspects of educational change include:
School Leadership and Management

International Journal of Educational Development
Communist and Post Communist Studies
Journal of Curriculum Studies
Asia Pacific Journal of Teacher Education
European Journal of Teacher Education
Journal of Innovation in Education
Journal of Organisational Change Management
System
English Language Teaching Journal
TESOL Quarterly
Teaching and Teacher Education
Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice
Specific reading on the nature of educational change, its complexity and approaches
to its leadership and management
One of the most prolific and influential writers in the area of educational change is
Michael Fullan from Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) in Toronto,
Canada. The most recent (fourth) edition of The New Meaning of Educational Change
(NMEC) is a comprehensive and very readable introduction to the range of issues
that any educational change initiative needs to consider. It is full of examples of
such initiatives. Almost all come from the North American, UK or Australia–New
Zealand context, and so implicitly assume a baseline that cannot be taken for
granted in many parts of the world.
Other publications that he has written or co-written include:
Polyzoi et al., Change Forces in Post-Communist Eastern Europe: Education in Transition.
This investigates and analyses educational and cultural transitions in the post-
communist countries of eastern and central Europe. Examples in this book
represent educational change processes taking place in settings that are very dif-
ferent from those in NMEC and they provide a good sense of what ‘reculturing’
can mean for all those affected when a previously highly centralized education
system suddenly begins to expect autonomous behaviour at all levels.
Fullan, M.G. (2001), Leading in a Culture of Change. San Francisco: Josey Bass.
This discusses in detail the range of understandings and skills that educational
change leadership requires.
Fullan, M.G. (1993), Change Forces 1993. London: Falmer.
Fullan, M.G. (1999), Change Forces the Sequel. London: Falmer.
Fullan, M.G. Change Forces with a Vengeance. London: Routledge-Falmer.
This trilogy of short books stress the reality that the nature of educational change
is non-linear and often seemingly chaotic, and discuss what can and cannot be done
in such circumstances, in terms of, for example, policy making and leadership
training, to try to achieve real sustainable reform.
The International Handbook of Educational Change has now been made available as
four separate paperback books, each of which contains a range of articles dealing in
detail with a particular aspect of educational change.
Lieberman, A. (ed.) (2005), The Roots of Educational Change. New York: Springer.
This looks at the growth of educational change as a field of study and at how ideas
about the nature of educational change, and how it can best be approached, have
developed over the past 60 years.
Hopkins, D. (2005) (ed.), The Practice and Theory of School Improvement. New York:
Springer.
The articles in this volume try to develop a theory of school improvement. They
look at case studies of school-improvement initiatives in Europe, North America
and Australia and consider some of the issues and tensions that arise when trying
to ‘improve’.
Fullan, M.G. (ed.) (2005), Fundamental Change. New York: Springer.
Writers in this volume consider some of the national and international forces that
motivate educational-change initiatives. They provide examples of large-scale change
initiatives in countries like the UK, Japan and Russia and discuss what the imple-
mentation of such changes imply for the professional development of those involved.
Hargreaves A. (ed.) (2005), Extending Educational Change. New York: Springer.
This looks beyond educational change itself to external factors that may influence
and be influenced by it. Articles for example discuss how change may affect the
different groups of people whom it involves and the organizations within which it
takes place, and how these may need to adjust in order to be able to be supportive
of educational change.
Markee, N. (1997), Managing Curricular Innovation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
This is situated in the language-teaching setting. It gives a good summary of some

of the approaches to/strategies that have been suggested for the management of
educational change initiatives.
Stevens, R.J. (2004), ‘Why do educational innovations come and go? What do we
know? What can we do?’, Teaching and Teacher Education, 20, 389–96.
Why is there so much change in education and how can teachers, trainers and
administrators work to reduce or slow down the stream of innovations that
American schools are subjected to?
Leithwood, K., Jantzi, D., Earl, L., Watson, N., Levin, B. and Fullan, M. (2004),
‘Strategic leadership for large scale reform: the case of England’s national literacy
and numeracy strategy’, School Leadership and Management, 24/1, 57–79.
This paper takes a very large-scale recent educational-change initiative, considers

how in such a setting leadership roles were distributed between local and national
levels, and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the approach that was taken.
People and change

As mentioned in section 1, until very recently far too little notice has been taken of
how the people affected by change have experienced educational-change processes.
The papers below all relate to educational change in the Anglophone world.
Examples from elsewhere will be given at the end of section 2.
Leithwood. K, Jantzi. D and Mascall, B. (2002), ‘A framework for research on large-

scale reform’, Journal of Educational Change, 3, 7–33.
This article looks at the processes involved in evaluating large-scale educational

reform. It discusses the ‘levers’ that policy makers try to use to support change
implementation and looks in some detail at the human and organizational factors
that seem to lead to differences in how those affected respond to change at different
institutions.
Hargreaves, A. (2000), ‘The four ages of professionalism and professional learning’,

Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 6/2, 151–82.
Hargreaves discusses how perceptions of what teachers have needed to know and be
able to do have changed over the past 50 years or so, and some of the contextual
features that have influenced changes.
Hargreaves, A. (2005), ‘Educational change takes ages: life, career and generational
factors in teachers; emotional responses to educational change’, Teaching and
Teacher Education, 21, 967–83.
As the title suggests this article looks at data from 50 Canadian teachers of
different ages and at different stages of their careers, and analyses how they respond
emotionally to educational change.
Rust, F. and Meyers, E. (2006), ‘The dark side of the moon: a critical look at teachers’
knowledge construction in collaborative settings. The bright side: teacher research
in the context of educational reform and policy making’, Teachers and Teaching:
Theory and Practice, 12/1, 69–86.
This is an interesting article looking at how teachers’ networks in the USA

have tried to use the outcomes of classroom enquiry/research to influence policy
making. Through doing so teachers have both become more confident about
engaging with policy makers and gained a greater understanding of policy.
Pennington, M. (1995), ‘The teacher change cycle’, TESOL Quarterly, 29/4, 705–31.
Guskey, T.R. (2002), ‘Professional development and teacher change’, Teachers and
Teaching: Theory and Practice, 8/3, 381–91.
Both present models that try to show the stages that teachers pass through as they
engage with change over time.
Oplatka, E. (2005), ‘Imposed school change and women teacher’s self renewal: a new
insight on successful implementation’, School Leadership and Management, 25/2,
171–90.
This is a fairly rare example of a paper that reports on data from teachers who have
experienced educational change as professionally and personally positive.
Section 2:
Case Studies
Introduction
Section 1 introduced and discussed some of the most important human and
contextual issues that need to be considered by policy makers and planners at the
educational-change planning-initiation and implementation stages. I feel these are
particularly important if a ‘complex’ change requiring some degree of ‘reculturing’
is ever to begin to become embedded in most classrooms, and so eventually
become a new part of everyday reality.
Some issues that I suggested policy makers needed to consider at the initiation/
planning stage of a complex educational change were:
what the people who will be affected by the implementation of the change
currently think and how they behave
what adjustment to current norms implementation of the proposed change
will therefore require
how the rationale for the change can be most clearly and appropriately
communicated to the different groups it will affect
how to include representatives of as many affected groups as possible in
discussions about realistic timescales for, and contextually appropriate forms
of, implementation
what support of what kinds over what timescale will be needed by different
groups of change participants
how to allocate responsibilities for leading and monitoring change most
effectively, and so how to allocate implementation funding
whether the change will affect other aspects of the education system (e.g. a
curriculum change requiring new materials and forms of assessment) and
how any such effects will impact on the planning and implementation
sequence
To be able to plan bearing these issues in mind, policy makers would in most cases
ideally spend time and money on some sort of formal, systematic ‘baseline study’
to give them a clear picture of where the change is starting from to guide their
decision making. When, as is usually the case, there is political and/or economic
pressure to move quickly to demonstrate visible evidence of actual implementa-
tion, this often does not happen. However, as I hope to show in section 3, I believe
that even when time is short there are a small number of questions that, if asked
and answered honestly (even if quickly), can provide valuable ‘baseline’ informa-
tion to support the change planning process.
Although national policy makers, especially those operating in very top-down
and hierarchical organizational cultures, still frequently behave as if change
implementation occurs in a neatly rational or linear manner, this is not the case.
How could it be when so many people are involved? Instead, as an ongoing process
that needs to be sensitive to contextual and human differences, the exact route and
speed of change implementation over the years of the process will vary across a
country, region or even a group of superficially similar schools in a local area.
Issues that I think will particularly influence the speed with which, and degree to
which, implementation is likely to occur in a particular local context include:
(a) How fully local leaders understand both the specific change itself and the
nature of the educational-change process more broadly, and so both wish
and are able to appropriately plan, monitor and support implementation
over time.
(b) How carefully the implementation process tries to identify and consider
local educational realities. Such realities may include material resources,
classroom conditions and the attitudes and ways of behaving that are most
common in local educational and organizational cultures. How teachers,
learners, school leaders, administrators and parents think, and how this
affects their behaviour, will strongly affect their response to, and
enthusiasm for, change, and so affect the route followed by the
implementation process and its ultimate outcomes.
(c) How much appropriate information and support is provided to help all the
above groups understand and/or become able to begin implementing, the
‘what’ and the ‘how’ of the change.
Figure 4.3 at the end of section 1 was an attempt to relate some of the large
number of possible educational-change variables to each other. However, inter-
relationships between the categories and the importance of particular variables for
successful educational-change implementation are dynamic rather than static and
will alter according to what type of change is being implemented where, and the
stage of the process that has been reached.
In this section I present three case studies of educational-change initiatives in
which I have been more or less directly involved. They all relate to changes to one
or more aspects of language-education provision in state-sector systems. I believe
however, that they illustrate aspects of the educational-change process that are
widely relevant to those responsible for initiation and/or planning implementation
of national and local changes right across the curriculum.
The purpose of this section of the book is to try to connect the decontextualized
discussion in section 1 to people’s real-life, lived experience. The chapters consider
Introduction 63
how the educational changes introduced by each case were planned and imple-
mented. They also highlight some consequences of initial planning for later
implementation. Each case could, if examined in detail, fill a complete book. It is
therefore important to point out that what follows represents a summary, and so a
simplification, of each case.
Each chapter begins with a background section in which I situate the case in
terms of the change it was trying to achieve and why the change had been
perceived to be necessary. I then discuss aspects of the manner in which it was
initiated/planned and implemented, relating the discussion to the main issues of
leadership, understanding of the existing context and availability of commu-
nication and support systems presented at (a) to (c) above. The final part of each
chapter considers what the case can tell us about issues/variables that seemed to
make a real difference to the change process in a real situation.
Chapter 5
A sudden need for English teachers
5.1 Background to the change
This change initiative was part of a larger process similar to the one outlined in
situation 1 in the introduction to this book. As part of a major national political
reorientation in the country, a decision was made to move from a very centralized
education system where ‘in every school every teacher taught children the same
content from the same textbooks on the same day’ (Horvath 1990: 209), to a much
more devolved system. Universities became autonomous and local governments
became responsible for the administration of schools. The interpretation of the
curriculum and choice of materials was devolved to individual schools, and within
these, decisions about exactly what happened in classrooms was the responsibility
of the teachers of different subjects. This massive decentralization of the education
system was soon followed by a new National Curriculum, whose suggested
teaching approaches, teacher–learner behaviour and hoped-for outcomes repre-
sented a clear shift from a more transmission-based towards a more interpretation-
based educational culture (see Figure 3.2 on page 39).
The decentralization of education was just one part of wider national (and
international) political changes that the country was undergoing. These led to a
sudden surge in the demand from parents for their children to be taught English.
There was a need to train large numbers of new English teachers. The Ministry of
Education (MoE), in collaboration with a foreign governmental agency, made a
plan to respond to this demand through the establishment of eight new English-
language teacher-training institutions situated across the country. The visible
educational change that was proposed was that students at these institutions
should study English as a single major (all other university programmes were
double majors), and should be able to graduate as English teachers with a uni-
versity degree that qualified them to teach at all levels of the state system after
three years’ study rather than the five years that was customary under the existing
regulations. The explicit aim of the initiative was thus to increase the number of
English teachers in schools.
A sudden need for English teachers 65
The decision was made to situate these new three-year programme (3YP)
English teacher-training institutions within, but independent of (in terms of
funding and curriculum) existing universities and teacher training colleges across
the country. Although each 3YP shared the same aim, each was situated within a
different local context. In the discussion that follows I sometimes refer to the 3YP
change process as a whole, and sometimes to the planning and implementation
process in one particular 3YP institution, which I refer to as ‘the case study’ below.
The 3YP initiative as originally conceived lasted for approximately six years, albeit
in different forms at different institutions. Thereafter, different 3YP institutions,
to the extent that they survived at all, developed completely differently.
5.2 The change-initiation/planning stage
5.2.1 Change leadership, timescale and funding
A formal agreement was signed between the MoE and the partner agency for a
period of three years (exactly the length of one proposed three-year course). The
initial capital costs of setting up and equipping the new institutions and the
ongoing funding of student places and staff salaries were met by the Ministry.
The partner-agency funding paid principally for the costs for expatriate ‘experts’,
the provision of professional support for 3YP staff and relevant professional
materials and resources, for example libraries, for the 3YP institutions.
Given that the political complexion of MoE and, in the context, their senior
civil servants, changed three times during the seven to eight years of the initi-
ative’s life time, the lack of consistent Ministry guidance over the case-study
period is not surprising. However, in fact all active MoE leadership and man-
agement support and guidance ended at the initiation stage, almost as soon as the
broad aims outline, physical structure and funding mechanisms of the 3YPs had
been agreed. It was unclear whether anybody in the Ministry had even short- to
medium-term responsibility for planning, monitoring or evaluating the content or
outcomes of the programme. There was no guidance regarding what ‘type’ of
English teacher it was hoped the 3YP would produce. There was no commu-
nication between the policy makers and the implementers about the aims and/or
duration of the 3YP initiatives. Newly recruited 3YP staff at the case-study
institution thus wrongly
took it for granted that it was going to be a long term thing. There was no
indication as to sustainability or that the financial support might be finite.
(Wedell 2000: 87)
MoE’s lack of guidance as regards 3YP content and outcomes meant that decisions
about these were strongly influenced by the external partner.
Although all 3YP institutions were established at the same time for the same
purpose, there was little uniformity from the start. Staff members at the HE
institutions with which they were associated viewed their ‘arrival’ with very
varying degrees of enthusiasm and comprehension. This, together with the dif-
ferences in institutional structure and culture between colleges and universities
and the regional differences between the various parts of the country, meant that
from the very beginning each 3YP institution differed to some extent in its degree
of genuine financial and curricular autonomy, its size, the background and atti-
tudes of its staff, and its physical setting.
At the case study 3YP, leaders of the existing English faculty at the host uni-
versity from the very beginning viewed the additional premises, facilities and staff
that the 3YP funding enabled, as resources that would one day probably revert to
the faculty. They chose one of their longest-serving colleagues as director of the 3YP
to ensure that departmental priorities were not forgotten. This hidden institutional
agenda was never communicated to new 3YP staff, who joined what they thought
would be a long-term, independent and innovative teacher-education institution.
The timescales to which the national policy makers committed themselves were
short. There had been no obvious consultation or discussion with anyone regarding
what the new 3YP institutions were supposed to do or how they were supposed to
do it. The time available to identify 3YP institution leaders and for them to find
and equip premises, recruit staff and students, and work out and prepare what and
how to teach the students, was in most cases less than six months.
In our case study 3YP, the director was a regionally well-known English-
grammar expert. He had no experience of teacher training or of ultimate
responsibility for leading an institution. If you were in his position, what
concerns would you have?
Section 1 suggested the critical role of local-change leaders. I think the new
director would have had many concerns. Due to his lack of teacher-education
expertise, he would be likely to be uncertain about:
what and how the institution was supposed to teach the trainees once they arrived
what teaching and learning materials needed to be bought or designed
how to equip the building for teaching teachers
how to advertise the programme to students in the recruitment literature,
since there were no stated aims for the 3YP
whether staff, facilities, a syllabus and teaching materials would be ready by
the time the students arrived
Due to his lack of prior leadership and management experience, he might also worry
about the new roles that he would need to play as director in terms of, for example:
leading and managing new staff who were themselves not experienced
teacher trainers
developing a strategic plan for the design and implementation of a teacher-
education curriculum whose content and expected outcomes are very
different from those of the curriculum with which he is familiar
5.2.2 Understanding the wider and local-change context
As you may sense from what I have said so far, there was political pressure on the
part of both MoE and their foreign partner to start the programmes very quickly.
The time available for assessment of the existing social, educational and organi-
zational environment was very limited, and serious consideration of how these
might influence what would be appropriate content and teacher-training
approaches for the 3YP did not therefore take place. As a senior local participant
said, ‘all the mistakes that were committed later were due to the fact that I had to
do everything very quickly’ (Wedell 2000: 82).
The people likely to be more or less directly affected by the new teacher-
training institutions included their future staff, and trainee teachers, and the
leaders, teachers, pupils and parents at the schools where the trainees would do
teaching practise and possibly eventually work. I also include the members of the
existing English departments at the ‘host’ institutions, who might view the
establishment of the 3YPs with some concern, as direct competitors for a limited
pool of students.
Policy makers had not defined the teaching content and approach for the
three-year programme (3YP) in any way.
If you had been responsible for leading the implementation process and
designing the 3YP English teacher-training curriculum, what information
would you have wanted about the wider and immediate context? Why?
I would have wanted to find answers to at least some of the following questions:
1. Should each 3YP expect to help and be helped by the others?

2. Can 3YPs expect to get support from their ‘host’ English departments?
3. Will it be easy to recruit trainees, and will they want to become teachers
when they graduate?
4. How does society currently view education? What do they expect it to be
like? What do they expect teachers to know and do? What about learners,
what do they expect English teachers to know and to be able to do? How
involved are parents in their children’s education? How are teachers
evaluated? Is the local area typical?
5. What are the aims of learning English at school according to the new
English curriculum? What do the important exams test?
6. How do schools and university departments work as organizations? Who
makes the final decisions? Is everybody encouraged to contribute? Do staff
usually share ideas and cooperate? How do people usually communicate
with each other? Is information freely available?
I would have wanted to find out something about each above area, because they
could potentially affect:
the degree of uniformity that it will be possible to achieve among 3YP

programmes and the speed with which they can be established (1 and 2)
how easy or difficult it is likely to be to recruit students and so how we
should set about doing so (3)
what kind of a training programme we will need to try to design; the
programme content and approach we will need to consider if graduates are to
be more or less prepared for the educational reality in which they will be
expected to work (4–6)
I look at each of the above questions and what issues their answers raise for the
wider 3YP context and/or the case study below.
1. The eight 3YP programmes were associated with universities and colleges all
over the country. Universities considered themselves superior to teacher-training
colleges, and even among institutional equals there was little tradition of inter-
institutional cooperation. Different regions of the country had different histories
and were united only in their dislike of the capital. The eastern part of the country
had always been poorer than other regions and so was at least slightly resentful of
the south and the west.
So spontaneous collaboration was unlikely, yet collaboration was desirable. What could be
done to foster cooperation? Whose responsibility was it to do so?
2. There was little enthusiasm for change in the case study’s host university
according to a member of the 3YP staff:
There wasn’t a felt need; they only had things to lose. . . . I think in terms of
ideology they were completely resistant. I’m sure they would have said,
‘We’re happy with the model we’ve got. We’ll develop it ourselves if we
think there is a need for it.’ (Wedell 2000: 89)
This was acknowledged by one of the university English-faculty leaders:
I can imagine that somebody from the outside will say that we didn’t want to
change either in the beginning. (Ibid: 100)
The 3YP was in direct competition with the existing ‘teacher training’ provided
by the host institutions. In addition, generous funding was initially provided for
the establishment of all 3YP institutions, and this was funding that might
otherwise have gone to the host institutions. Salaries for 3YP staff were set slightly
higher than those for existing academics in the host institutions, even though
most of these new staff had little or no teacher-training experience.
In such circumstances, what support could 3YPs expect from their host institutions?
3. Nationally teachers’ salaries were poor. In a society where status was increas-
ingly related to wealth, their status was low. However, the ability to use English
was a scarce and therefore marketable commodity. Consequently it would probably
be quite easy to recruit students, but many of those who graduated from the 3YP
might not want to become teachers. There were many other career opportunities
open to them that paid better.
How would the scarcity of English skills in the wider society affect the extent to which 3YPs
would be able to achieve their aim of supplying the state sector with sufficient English
teachers?
4. Society viewed education as the transmission of fact-based knowledge from

teachers to learners, to be memorized and later tested. A case study 3YP staff
member saw it thus:
You need education to get more knowledge. When you have learned facts you
have knowledge. You go to school to learn facts and when you have learned
them you gain knowledge. (Ibid: 113)
Most people (parents) were less interested in education than the product of edu-
cation, the certificates and the degrees that could lead to good jobs. Success in
examinations was therefore seen as extremely important and frequent testing was a
feature of schools at all levels. Classrooms were traditionally hierarchical. The
teacher was in charge, learners were expected to be silent and listen to the teacher
lecturing. The concept of knowledge as fact meant that any question had a right
answer. Teachers were therefore expected to know the answer to any question that
the learners might pose and were worried by questions that they could not answer.
English teachers who were trained in the existing system were expected to have
a high level of linguistic proficiency and to thoroughly understand the facts needed
to to teach grammar and word formation rules. They were also expected to know
facts about English literature, culture and history. The educational part of their
training was also almost entirely academic, spending virtually no time on the
development of practical teaching skills. Teaching practice in schools involved 10–
15 hours of teaching, supervised by teachers who had no specific training for their
role. Teaching, like all other ‘subjects’, was seen as objectively assessable and
evaluated by performance in an ‘exam lesson’. A member of the 3YP staff who was
a graduate of such a programme commented:
We started our careers without having any guidance as far as teaching is
concerned. I had to struggle for 3 or 4 years until I knew how to teach. I
knew about Pestalozzi and teaching in China 2000 years ago but nothing
about real teaching. (Ibid:121)
How would the 3YPs want to adjust the content and process of their new programmes?
5. Within society at large the product of education was emphasized, and the main
aim of learning English was to pass the high-stakes exams. These exams continued
to test mostly facts about the language rather than the ability to use it.
Would it be necessary to bear the need for trainees to be able to help their learners to pass such
exams in mind when designing the new programme?
6. The way in which the host university heard about the case study 3YP initiative
was as follows:
I heard about the whole plan from . . . who was the Dean who received some
message from the Ministry. The task was clear, that a new type of teacher
training had to be established. The Dean had to solve this problem. (Ibid:
101)
This top-down approach was typical of the organizational culture within education
more generally. The hierarchy was stable and clear. At each level of the hierarchy
people were expected to carry out decisions handed down from higher up.
Everyone was used to being told what he or she should do. As the quote from
Horvath above suggests, before the decentralization most teachers at all levels of
education had little need for, and little experience of, planning or taking auton-
omous decisions.
Communication of information within organizations was on a need to know
basis and teachers at all levels were expected to carry out their jobs without asking
questions. Such a culture was not conducive to active cooperation and collabora-
tion among teachers, whose role (see 4) was to know their subject and be able to
answer any questions about it, and who therefore were potentially always a little
afraid of judgement and possible criticism.
The 3YP staff came from an educational and organizational culture that had only expected
teachers to react. What support would they need to develop the skills/confidence needed to
proactively take the many academic, practical and strategic initiatives needed?
As mentioned previously, no baseline study that might have identified contextual

issues such as these was carried out at the planning stage. National policy makers
gave no guidance regarding programme content and approach. They provided no
leadership or management support. At the beginning of the implementation stage
leaders of 3YP institutions and their staff had only their own previous experience
on which to base their attempt to establish the ‘new type of teacher training’.
5.2.3 Clarity of expectations and provision of support
The 3YP programme was a collaboration between national policy makers (MoE)
and a foreign partner. MoE planners were members of a new and inexperienced
government, and detailed knowledge of the region among most representatives of
the foreign partner was largely confined to knowledge of the capital. The main aim
of the initiative, to produce more English teachers quickly, was quite clear. There
was however no coherent agreement about what the nature of the training should
be.
Given this lack of clarity, the very top-down organizational cultures at the time
(see 6 in 5.2.2 above), and the lack of a common language, communication
between MoE and the foreign partner, and between them and the host institutions,
was often poor. As a result, (it later became clear that) there were different
understandings of what had actually been agreed. This revealed itself in terms of
lack of clarity about who, at what level of the hierarchy, was ultimately responsible
for deciding what, and in disagreements about the degree of financial and curri-
cular independence that the 3YPs should have from their host institutions.
The lack of guidance from national policy makers about what form the 3YP was
supposed to take, and the limited prior experience of national 3YP staff, meant
that the expatriate staff recruited by the foreign partner as deputy directors of the
various 3YP programmes took a significant leadership role. They became
responsible for planning the content and approach of the 3YP curriculum, even
though they had little or no in-depth understanding of the organizational or
educational cultures in which they would be operating.
The first 3YP institution was established in the capital one year before all the
others. Given the lack of any other guidance, the model that they established had
great influence as an important point of reference and starting point for 3YPs at all
other institutions. To a significant extent the model adopted here became, in
various adapted forms, the 3YP model, the new model of teacher education that
separated 3YP programmes from those that already existed and that linked 3YP
staff at different institutions.
The director of this first institution was the most prominent English-language
teaching professional in the country, and with his foreign deputy the model took
the form of a much more practical training, intended to be closely linked to the
reality of teaching in schools. It had less focus than was traditional on literature
and linguistics, instead emphasizing methodology and language competence. It
made a conscious choice to base its curriculum around an outcome for teacher
education that was beginning to become current in Anglo-American language
teaching circles, that of a ‘reflective’ teacher. Such a view of the outcome of teacher
training implies a curriculum that enables trainees to experience and recognize
that professional development is an ongoing process, and that they remain
responsible for continuing to develop their professional understanding and skills
through thinking about and acting on the explicit and implicit outcomes and
experiences of their classroom teaching, throughout their professional lives.
Retrospectively, the choice of this aim seems a little incongruous, given that in
the country from which the foreign ‘experts’ came, the aim of teacher education
was moving in the opposite direction towards preparing teachers to be good
‘technicists’ (Malderez and Wedell 2007: 13) able to teach a predetermined
national curriculum in a consistent manner. This is a good example of how, as a
result of political changes, and the ideological changes that often accompany them,
educational policy makers in different countries may, at the same point in time,
introduce changes that move their education systems in opposite directions along
the continuum introduced at the start of section 1.
Does such a ‘reflective’ model ‘fit’ the existing concept of education and the
teacher’s role as discussed in 4.2.2?
Some ways in which I think the idea of a reflective teacher in the sense expressed
above might conflict with the existing concepts include:
the idea of a reflective teacher suggests that there is more to good teaching
than the successful transmission of facts to learners, since if good teaching
only involved this, a teacher who knew the facts thoroughly would have
completed his/her professional development
if learning to teach is an ongoing process and involves more than the
transmission of facts, then it is possible that there will often be more than
one possible answer to the many questions that may arise in the classroom. If
this is so then the definition of a ‘good’ teacher needs to be altered to include
the ability to help learners deal with and choose among multiple points of
view
if there are often potentially multiple points of view, it is possible that
learners may sometimes know better than their teacher. It also raises
questions about whether assessment that is purely based on the accurate
recall of facts can in fact be considered to accurately represent what learners
know
all of the above have implications for the roles of teachers and learners in the
classroom, and for how these roles are perceived by interested parties in the
wider society
5.2.4 Conclusion
The initiation stage of this educational change initiative was hurried and carried
out without any real consideration of the context into which the 3YPs were being
introduced. The national policy makers withdrew from active involvement as soon
as the infrastructure – in terms of funding and agreements with host institutions –
had been established. They took no part in deciding what form this new training
should take. They did not consider whether the social climate was one in which
the 3YP graduates would wish to become teachers, and so whether the purpose of
the whole initiative would be supported. Responsibility for planning, monitoring
and supporting 3YP implementation was effectively passed to the expatriate
employees of the foreign partner with whom they had agreed to collaborate. These
knew little about the context for which they were planning. I next discuss how,
given the above, 3YP programmes began to be implemented.
5.3 The change-implementation stage
5.3.1 Matching change to local realities
Little attempt had been made to investigate contextual issues at the change
initiation stage. Each 3YP institution thus had to cope with the wider environ-
ment in which it found itself as best it could at the implementation stage. This
was made more difficult by the other changes taking place in both national and
local environments throughout the implementation process.
The 3YP was initiated in response to a sudden surge in demand for English
teaching at schools, which itself was a result of wider political and economic
changes in society. Attitudes nationally and locally had been very open to and
positive about these wider changes at the point that the 3YPs were established.
However, as the reality of what they implied for people’s daily lives became
clearer, enthusiasm for the whole idea of change lessened. There was growing
unemployment and inflation rose to well over 20 per cent a year. While some
people were becoming rich, more felt poorer. More families had two working
parents, leading to a perception among those working within the education system
that there was less parental supervision of children and that learners behaved less
obediently at school.
New patterns of relationships between local and central government under the
new decentralized system were still developing. Local educational administrators
were grappling with responsibilities for which they had no training. Regional
economic differences meant that local authorities in different parts of the country
increasingly varied in the funding they devoted to schools. Parents’ contributions
to school budgets began to become important. With education being seen ever
more instrumentally as a means to the achievement of material goals, parents who
contributed to school funds began to demand a say in how schools were run. In
such an unusually unstable wider environment, deciding which local realities
represented ‘reality’ (and so should be the benchmark for decisions about how to
approach the implementation process) were difficult to assess, even if anybody had
thought of trying to do so.
There were however also certain environmental constants throughout the
implementation period. One was the poor pay and therefore ever-lessening status
of teachers. Three years after her graduation, the daughter of the case study 3YP
director earned five times as much as he did after decades as a university teacher.
Comments from 3YP students and staff show perceptions at the time:
I don’t think today being a teacher is recognised at any level. It’s more like
you pity somebody who’s a teacher. (Ibid. 168)
It is almost impossible for a young person with a family to make ends meet
on the ridiculous salary they get at Primary or Secondary school. (Ibid. 169)
Teachers’ poor pay had several negative consequences for the 3YP initiative. It
soon became clear that fewer and fewer graduates of the programme wished to
become teachers. This was very demotivating for 3YP staff.
I think it is quite harmful the knowledge that you know that the students
you have are not going to be teachers. So there is no real meaningful aim for
them in terms of spending their time here. So the validity of the whole thing
is gone. (Ibid. 224)
Inflation meant that by the second or third year of implementation, 3YP staff
salaries were insufficient to enable them to work full time in their 3YP role. This
of course affected their ability to work as team, making it very difficult to arrange
meetings to coordinate teaching, and so ultimately diminished the coherence of

the 3YP programme that was offered.
Another constant feature of the national, and therefore all local, environments
was the largely unchanged educational culture in most schools. There had been
huge legislative changes in national education policy. A new national curriculum
was introduced, emphasizing the need to develop learners’ skills as well as teach
them facts. Schools were legally entitled to decide how to interpret the curriculum
through syllabuses that were appropriate for their learners. However, this was a
further example of ‘paper’ changes alone being insufficient to lead to actual
changes in what happened in classrooms. The lack of central government support
and guidance meant few schools accepted the opportunity to change. The teaching
and learning of English (and other subjects) continued to be seen by many tea-
chers, head teachers, educational administrators and especially parents as the
transmission and memorization of whatever knowledge about the subject was
contained in the prescribed textbook for the year of study. The format and content
of high-stakes tests, unchanged despite the above policy shifts, strongly supported
this perception.
As a result, the methodological training that trainees on every 3YP received,
which emphasized the practices, techniques and activities that were then thought
to be helpful for providing learners with both knowledge about the language and
the ability to use it, was not always implementable in schools when trainees went
out on their teaching practice. 3YP trainees themselves were of course also ‘pro-
ducts’ of the existing educational culture. Some of them therefore found it difficult
to take the oral-language-development classes that were central to the first year of
the programme as seriously as the as ‘real’ learning that was done in linguistics or
literature classes. The pupils in the schools in which they practised were no
different, as some case-study trainees reported:
The only thing they [Primary school pupils] have to learn is grammar,
because that is what is to be asked in the entrance exams for the grammar
schools. I know it doesn’t come from the kids but their parents. (Ibid. 171)
I have a student who is always trying to write down everything I’m saying. I
go ‘don’t write everything down’. He comes to me after class and asks, ‘how
shall I prepare for you?’ I say ‘try to cooperate, you don’t need to write
everything down’. There are some students like him. They have to change
their whole point of view about learning. (Ibid. 171)
The 3YP model of language teacher training (which everywhere was some version
of that described at 5.2.3 above) was not consistent with the reality prevailing in
the majority of schools.
Nonetheless, newly recruited staff in the eight 3YP institutions had to design
and implement a curriculum for their trainees. I next discuss the extent to which
they were supported in developing the new skills that their work on the 3YP
demanded.
5.3.2 Support for learning the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of change
The backgrounds of staff recruited to provide the 3YP training varied from one
institution to another. In the case study 3YP they were all graduates from the host
university English department who had become successful secondary-school
English teachers. They had no background in teacher training.
Since they had previously been teachers, staff from the host university viewed
their ‘promotion’ to teacher trainer with scepticism. Throughout the first years of
the implementation process, university staff openly made negative comments
about the academic quality of the curriculum and the academic ability of both
3YP staff and students. This lack of support from the established university staff
had the positive effect of making 3YP staff more determined to develop their own
independent programme, but also meant that in most institutions staff felt
undervalued and unsupported by their immediate academic environment. This
feeling was strengthened in the case study setting by a sense that the 3YP director
lacked the necessary leadership qualities (see 5.3.3). It was not until the third year
of implementation, when teachers and school leaders in practice schools evaluated
trainees’ professional knowledge and skills positively, that staff in the case study
3YP began to receive any positive responses to their efforts.
National policy makers made no suggestions regarding the content of the new
3YP curriculum. The model adopted by the first institution to be established
therefore provided important guidance. However, the material and human
resources available in the capital were not necessarily available everywhere else and
so their model needed to be reinterpreted by each 3YP institution to become
useable.
The 3YP implementers everywhere were also working in a constantly changing
policy environment (see 5.3.3). They had little opportunity to consolidate their
development of one set of understandings and skills before a new set were needed.
Implementation at the case-study institution showed the truth of the statement
that ‘We never know what implementation is or should look like until people in
particular situations attempt to spell it out through use’ (Fullan 1991: 92). The
process took the form of continuous cycles of larger- and smaller-scale planning
and implementation to meet immediate needs for syllabuses and materials, fol-
lowed by re-planning and re-implementation in the light of feedback from trainees
and eventually schools, and in response to unpredicted policy changes. I believe
that for any complex change that entails ‘reculturing’ of some kind, even if
implementation has been planned with the local context in mind, the process at
local/institutional level will always involve such a series of planning, trying out
and re-planning cycles before any final form implementation can be reached.
As I am sure you can imagine from the above description of their background,
staff of the case study 3YP had a huge amount to learn and to do. They had been
recruited only a few months before the students arrived. They had only the
‘reflective’ 3YP model discussed earlier to guide them, but few clear syllabuses or
materials to begin teaching with. Their previous experience was of being teachers
in the educational culture outlined at point 4 in 5.2.2 above.
What help would you hope to receive in their situation?
Some help that I would have needed would have included help to understand:
the implications of a reflective model of teacher education for the content of

the 3YP, and how it needed to be adjusted to ‘fit’ the local context. What
sorts of courses needed to be offered? In what order? What weighting should
be given to each course in the whole programme?
how to develop syllabuses, and choose or design materials to support their
teaching
and become able to use teaching approaches that were consistent with the
ideas about teaching and teacher development that a local version of reflective
model espoused
how to assess trainees’ knowledge and skills
how to build relationships with schools. After all trainees were supposed to
spend most of their third year in schools. Which schools? What preparations
would need to be made in order to ensure that the school supervisors
understood what the 3YP programme was trying to achieve?
3YP staff had to learn a lot very fast if they were to be able to offer their trainees
a coherent teacher-training programme. MoE had made no provision for sup-
porting such learning and responsibility for doing so therefore fell to the foreign
partner, and the expatriate deputy directors whom they employed, and who of
course arrived with their own assumptions about what was appropriate deriving
from their prior experiences and their very different educational culture.
The first support provided for most new 3YP staff immediately before the first
group of trainees arrived was a one-month course in English-language teaching
methodology. This was a well-established and internationally recognized course,
based on beliefs about the nature of language, learning and language-teaching
methodology regarded as appropriate for training teachers to work in private
language schools rather than in state-education systems. Given their brevity, such
courses have little choice but to promote a particular ‘communicative’ language
teaching method to be followed, rather than a flexible teaching approach based on
a set of principles and techniques that need to be adapted to local circumstances.
Negative feedback from early trainees on the over-zealous application of this
‘communicative method’ in the early implementation stage at the case study 3YP,
added to the constant adjustments to teaching content and methodology that were
required throughout the first years of the programme.
However, the 3YP was not merely a language course and each 3YP institution
had to develop a curriculum, syllabuses and materials in order to be able to
implement the teacher-training aspect of the programme. To begin with,
responsibility for doing so was largely devolved to the expatriate deputy directors.
In the case study institution, the new staff members were encouraged to partici-
pate as fully as they were able in this process (see 4.3.3), and the foreign agency
recognized the critical need for them to be professionally enabled to participate.
The next phase of formal support, provided throughout the first few years of the
implementation process, therefore consisted of short (one week or less) professional-
development workshops led by expatriate ‘experts’ for 3YP staff from all eight
institutions. These focused on discrete areas of professional expertise such as
testing and assessment, syllabus design and dissertation supervision. ‘Experts’ lack
of understanding of participants’ prior experience meant that these sometimes
assumed too much prior knowledge and so increased implementers’ anxiety.
Overall, though, these played an important role in establishing a 3YP identity by
providing a forum where implementers could meet colleagues from other insti-
tutions and share their ideas, problems and insecurities in a supportive environ-
ment. The following quote from one member of the case-study staff gives a sense
of this:
There was this kind of solidarity because these places (3YP institutions) were
looked down on by their main departments so there was a kind of national
solidarity and the people we got to know we treated each other like collea-
gues. There wasn’t the sort of envy . . . we were willing to cooperate. (Ibid.
219)
Given how much there was to learn, and the rush to learn it in order to be able to
teach the hundreds of trainees who had been recruited, it is not surprising that the
emphasis in the above workshops, and of the less formal support provided by
deputy directors within 3YP institutions should be on ‘how to do things’ rather
than on the theoretical rationale for doing them in a particular manner. Conse-
quently, it was not unusual during the first years of implementation for 3YP
implementers to know ‘what to do’ without necessarily being able to explain
‘why’. This added to their overall stress during the implementation period.
A final stage of professional support provided by the foreign agency was to fund
implementers to attend specialist professional international summer schools and
one-year professional MA programmes overseas or in-country through distance
learning, to follow up areas introduced at in-country workshops. Overseas MA
degrees were not recognized as a qualification in the national context, and so on
paper did little to enhance the perceived expertise of those who gained them.
However, in the case study setting, 3YP staff who did successfully complete such
courses were unofficially acknowledged to have reached a higher level of profes-
sional competence by the host university leadership. This recognition was to have
important implications for their future employment prospects when the 3YP
ended (see 5.3.3).
A further, very important, more indirect, form of support for the imple-
mentation of the 3YP, provided at all institutions to a varying degree, was the
professional development provided for the in-school supervisors of 3YP trainees’
teaching practice. One of the most significant 3YP innovations was the extension
of teaching practice from the handful of hours on the existing university pro-
grammes to six months or even a full academic year. For such an extended teaching
practice to make sense, it was essential that there should be reasonable consistency
between the professional messages that trainees received on the 3YP and those they
received from their in-school supervisors when they arrived in schools. Conse-
quently, an additional feature of the implementation process at most 3YP insti-

tutions involved the recruitment of a large number of school supervisors and the
development and teaching of a training programme that would enable them to
support trainees as fully as possible during the teaching practice. As with all other
aspects of implementation, the development of appropriate programmes was an
ongoing process, with the balance between methodological and supervisory/
mentoring training changing over time. (For more information on this aspect of
the change process see Medgyes and Malderez 1996.)
The implementation process thus involved 3YP staff with a huge professional
challenge. Over several years they were exposed to a mixture of formal professional
development support and actually having to ‘do’ all sorts of new things within the
3YP implementation setting, a mixture of what Schon (1983) would call ‘received’
and ‘experiential’ knowledge. Not all staff had equal opportunities to receive
formal support, since opportunities were affected by unstable foreign-agency
funding, which often had to be spent within certain time limits, and declined
substantially over time. However at the case-study institution, by the time the
3YP ended (see 5.3.3), many implementers felt that they did have the professional
competence and confidence needed to implement 3YP programmes. As some of
them stated:
We were not in a position to have more ownership over the programme in
the beginning. I think we are at a stage where we can take over.
At the beginning there was this immediate need, this pressure. There was
actually a staff here who hadn’t got the knowledge they needed to have and at
the same time they had to act on it. Now we have it.
We have reached autonomy and independence. There are quite a few very
experienced and highly developed people in the profession. (Ibid. 225)
I would be very happy to report that the 3YP story ended here with, in the case
study setting at least, a general feeling of satisfaction at staff having been rea-
sonably well supported through a fairly successful implementation process.
However, as the next section shows, changes in the wider environment meant that
in the case-study setting as soon as one set of challenges had been more or less
successfully met, another appeared that required a whole new process of profes-
sional change. This new stage of the change process, coming at a point when
national policy makers’ interest in the 3YP had entirely withered away, and when
the foreign partner’s commitment was rapidly diminishing, was far less well
supported.
5.3.3 Leadership of the 3YP change process
In 5.3.1 I pointed out that the national environment was itself constantly chan-
ging throughout the implementation process. Within the education system,
decentralization meant that the role of institutional leader became far more
complex than it had been when the system was more top down and centralized,
and when leading at a local level was therefore principally a matter of ensuring
that instructions from higher-ups were followed. This era of multiple changes was
confusing for administrative and institutional leaders at all levels.
As authority was taken away there was no experience or competence to cope
with the newly gained freedom. Frustration cried out for a paternalistic state.
(Horvath 1990: 212)
The ultimate leaders, the national policy makers, did not themselves have the
experience to offer effective support or guidance to either local-education leaders or
to the very much less significant 3YP initiative. Instead, their policies made the
3YP implementation process ever more complex.
Policy makers had introduced a new national curriculum. Local education
administrators and school leaders were left to try to cope with the leadership
demands of their newfound responsibilities for education in their areas and/or the
implementation of the new national curriculum in their schools, largely unsup-
ported. It is not surprising that in the circumstances many opted to stick to what
was familiar and in many schools teachers continued to be expected to complete
the allocated textbook by the end of the term or year and stick to teaching the facts
needed for success in exams. Where this was the case, even if school supervisors
were broadly sympathetic, 3YP students on teaching practice found a mismatch
between what they had been trained to do and what they were expected to do in
real classrooms. The content of, and approach to, 3YP methodological training had
to be frequently readjusted to reach a workable compromise between ideals and
realities.
National leaders undermined the 3YP initiative more dramatically through new
legislation. The whole purpose of the initiative had been to train large numbers of
English teachers to meet the demand for English throughout the school system.
Prior to the initiative, only graduates of the five-year university training had been
entitled to teach at upper-secondary level. Teachers for other levels were trained at
four-year colleges. Since 3YP graduates were to be able to teach across the system,
it was assumed that the qualification they would receive would be equivalent to a
five-year university degree. This made the 3YP an extremely attractive option, and
enabled the initiative to recruit many able trainees. However, even before the first
group of trainees had graduated from the case study 3YP institution, a new Higher
Education Law was passed stating that 3YP graduates, while still being able to
work across the system, would receive a college-level degree. They could if they
wished spend two more years at university to get a ‘proper’ degree. At the same
time the passing of a new Public Service Law formalizing the grading and salaries
of all public servants highlighted the significant difference in salary and status
between those with university and college degrees.
What effects would you expect this downgrading of the 3YP qualification to
have on 3YP trainees, their teachers and future recruitment?
Some of the effects that it did have at the 3YP case study institution were:
the academic level of the students applying to join the 3YP became lower.
This meant that staff had to make further adjustments to course content and
teaching that had originally been designed for trainees of a higher level
programme graduates became even less likely to actually enter teaching since
their salaries, as teachers, which were already low, would be even lower than
expected. More of them sought jobs outside teaching or went to the
university for two more years
the 3YP staff became more and more aware that very few of those whom they
were training were actually interested in going into teaching. This was of
course demotivating for them, especially given the hard work that they had
put in, and were continuing to put in, to becoming competent and confident
teacher trainers
National-level leadership, therefore, rather than being supportive, consciously or

unconsciously undermined the implementation of the 3YP initiative that it had
introduced.
Local leadership varied greatly from one 3YP context to another. In the case-
study context the director brought little relevant prior experience to the role. His
previous role as deputy dean of the university English faculty in the days before
university autonomy had not prepared him at all for the twin roles of leading the
professional development of a new teacher-training institution and developing an
institutional identity and strategic plan.
While there was no formal allocation of responsibilities between the two,
professional leadership of the implementation process was largely delegated to the
expatriate deputy director. She was professionally extremely competent but had
little experience of the educational and organizational culture of the environment
and consequently found it difficult to understand the need to make some of the
adjustments that were essential if a broadly ‘reflective’ teacher-training curriculum
was to work in the local context. She had an inclusive leadership style that
encouraged staff to be as involved as they felt able to be in the mass of syllabus and
materials design and development work that characterized the first years of
implementation. She recognized that interaction, collaboration and mutual aid
were critical contributors to professional learning and established the tradition of
weekly meetings at which everyone could discuss all issues. She therefore
encouraged the introduction of a very different organizational culture to that
existing in the schools at which most staff had previously worked, one char-
acterized by trust and collaborative teamwork, which staff reacted to very posi-
tively: ‘We were all for it, we loved it, that’s why we did it’ (ibid. 211).
As implementation progressed, 3YP staff and student numbers increased, as did
the amount of new work needing to be done just to keep abreast of the syllabus
and teaching demands of the three years of the programme. The intimacy and
constant teamwork of the early stages lessened, and these factors together with the
deputy director’s lack of willingness to adjust ideals to local realities led to con-
frontations. Staff turned to the director. Due partly to personality, and partly to
the fuzziness surrounding roles and responsibilities, he was unable to mediate
effectively. In the organizational culture in which staff had spent most of their
working lives, leaders were expected to lead. His inability to make clear decisions
when staff had disagreements with the expatriate deputy therefore severely com-
promised his authority. After the first two years the deputy left and was replaced.
For the following five years the staff remained stable. While the intensity of the
teamwork and collaboration that had characterized the early stages did not return,
the tradition of regular meetings, open communication and access to information
for all remained a feature of the 3YP culture, recognized by staff:
We were absolutely encouraged to participate and it was absolutely necessary
for us all to participate in everything. Never when anybody had an idea were
they discouraged or shut up by anybody higher up. It often happened that
ideas were passed on and nothing happened, but nobody’s participation was
ever discouraged. (Ibid. 216–217)
In this sense the case study 3YP institution (and some others) did develop its own
identity and sub-culture, very different from that existing in the host-university
English department, and most other educational institutions at the time.
While the teacher-training professionalism of the case-study institution clearly
grew throughout the implementation stage and, as noted above, reached a point
where external support was no longer perceived to be necessary, the development
of decision-making and strategic-planning skills was far slower. The previous top-
down culture had been so pervasive that neither the director nor any of the 3YP
staff had any experience of institutional strategic planning. As the director said,
‘the most difficult of this is planning curriculum-wise, to be able to see what I
have to do say in two years time’ (ibid: 179). Most aspects of forward planning for
the 3YP while it continued, and for the next phase of the change (see below),
therefore remained the responsibility of the expatriate deputy director for as long
as the post existed.
The 3YP staff’s lack of involvement in strategic decision making throughout
the implementation stage, meant that most of them were also not centrally
involved in planning how to respond to the end of the 3YP. National policy
makers, first through their policy decisions above and later through stating that
they would no longer fund students to study on 3YPs, clearly saw no future for the
institutions as they existed. What then was to become of the physical infra-
structure and the staff? Again, in the case-study context, it was the foreign partner
who strongly influenced the decision that was made.
Just prior to the publication of the new Higher Education Act downgrading the
3YP qualification, the foreign partner commissioned an external evaluation of the
3YP in the eight institutions. This, when made public soon after the above Act,
pointed out that the quantitative aims of the initiative were not being met, since
relatively few trainees saw teaching as a desirable career. It recommended that the
3YP initiative should cease to be a separate set of institutions with a separate
teacher-education curriculum, and should instead begin to try and merge with,
and so influence the curriculum of, the existing five-year university/four year
college systems. It further suggested that continued funding from the foreign
partner and continued provision of expatriate staff should be made contingent on
there being evidence of this merging process occurring.
In the foreign partner’s eyes, the outcomes by which the success of the
implementation initiative would be judged thus changed. Initially they had been
quantitative: the number of qualified (the term had remained undefined) teachers
trained and entering the school system. This had been at best partly successful.
The outcomes now became qualitative: the extent to which innovations in English
teacher training introduced by the 3YP curriculum could be seen, in some form or
another, in the longstanding existing university/college teacher-training pro-
grammes.
The national 3YP initiative finally petered out when MoE announced that it
would no longer fund 3YP students. Some 3YP institutions ceased to exist. The
3YP in the capital was supported by the foreign partner in setting up the country’s
first PhD programme in Language Pedagogy in collaboration with its host uni-
versity, and the 3YP itself continued quasi-independently there for a few more
years.
In the case-study setting, after protracted negotiations between the 3YP leaders
and the university English faculty, the faculty’s long-term strategy of eventually
absorbing the 3YP bore fruit. The staff and premises of the 3YP became a new
department within the faculty responsible for all teacher training. Some of the
3YP innovations were accepted, with faculty leaders acknowledging their super-
iority.
I think the greatest achievement of the new programme has been to

demonstrate how important teacher training is, how much you need in terms
of the number of methodology classes and the amount of time devoted to
teaching practice. (Ibid. 236)
The methodology component is better (on the 3YP) towering above what we
have here. Your model is ideal here too. Nobody questions that. (Ibid. 237)
In addition to its teacher-training responsibilities, the new department would offer

an Applied Linguistics academic track to undergraduates and a distance upgrading
programme for English teachers who did not have a full university degree. A
minority of 3YP staff, those without M-level qualifications, were regarded as
insufficiently qualified to be university teachers and lost their jobs. Those that
remained faced the beginning of a new implementation stage, involving new
personal and professional changes. First they had to register for, and within five
years obtain, a PhD to be regarded as qualified to be university teachers. Next they
had to restart the process of designing a new programme, this time with the
emphasis on more theoretically grounded academic Applied Linguistic courses.
They had to learn about how to design a distance-learning programme and the text
and online materials to support such learning. They had completed almost a
decade of constant change and were now entering a second.
5.4 What does the case study tell us about educational change?
What I have written here is a very condensed account of some features of an

educational-change initiative that spanned almost a decade. It was a complex
change (Fullan 1992) involving the reculturing of the change implementers in
terms of their beliefs about the content and process of language-teacher education
and the development of new practical skills to enable them to provide appropriate
initial teacher training for English teachers. It involved perhaps a hundred staff
and several thousand students. In terms of its scale it was therefore quite small.
Nonetheless, I feel that it reinforces certain messages about educational changes
that are very relevant to those who lead it.
5.4.1 Legislating for change does not mean it happens
If policy makers genuinely wish to introduce new teaching and learning practices
that will lead to new learning outcomes for most learners in most classrooms, they
need to understand that legislating for a change is merely the beginning of a long
change planning and implementation process. Every stage of the process will be
made more difficult for all involved, and the human and material resources
expended will be less likely to yield the hoped-for outcomes, if policy makers do
not take the trouble to think carefully about:
(a) the reasons for their legislation and how these can best be communicated to
those who will be affected
(b) which features of the existing context may support or undermine the
change that they hope to bring about, and try to act to minimize the
influence of potentially undermining features of the context (such as in this
case the pay and status of teachers, and the mismatch between curriculum
aims and high stakes assessment)
(c) what extent of reculturing the change represents, and what this implies for
the provision of adequate support over time to enable implementers and
everyone else who will be affected to learn how to behave in a different
manner
Policy makers cannot, as was the case here, merely sign the enabling legislation
and detach themselves entirely from the detailed change planning and imple-
mentation process, and still expect change to occur.
5.4.2 Complex educational change takes time
This has a number of consequences.

First, in the current rapidly changing global environment it is unlikely that all
features of the wider national or even international environment in which a change
was initially planned will remain the same throughout the change-implementation
process. For example, implementers in the case study, who were intensively
exposed to change on a daily basis, reported that it took them 3–5 years to feel
mastery (Fullan 1993) of the teaching behaviours and practices that the 3YP
introduced and of the principles on which they were based. Only then could they
be effective disseminators who could persuasively influence others. While this
developmental process was going on within individual implementers, aspects of
the original wider environment in which the change was planned were themselves
changing in ways that were more or less conducive to the achievement of the
hoped-for change outcomes. One example of such a change from the 3YP is the
national growth of alternative job opportunities for those with good English skills
during the implementation period, which made it less likely that 3YP graduates
would wish to enter teaching. Depending on the nature and extent of such changes
in the external environment, the actual outcome of implementation may be more
or less similar to what was originally planned.
If this is so, then national policy makers need to:
try to be realistic about the timescale of their proposed changes. If they are
planning long term, it is possible that some aspects of the environment that
they take for granted as they carry out their initial change planning may have
changed by the time the implementation process is well under way.
recognize that, consequently, for complex change initiatives, the plans that
they make at the beginning of the change process will almost certainly need
to be adjusted over time if they are to continue to be able guide the
implementation process.
accept that a change process is never a purely rational, linear chain of context
neutral events in which certain inputs will ‘deliver’ certain outputs. Any such
process will need to be evolutionary, in the sense of adjusting its route and
even its aims according to what is happening in the wider environment.
monitor the wider external socio-economic and political environment for
changes that are likely to affect the rate or route of implementation.
respond to any such changes by adjusting expectations accordingly.
A second consequence of the long-term nature of much complex educational

change is that during its extended implementation process the institutional
(school or local educational administrator’s office) change environment may itself
change as a result of participating in the implementation. This case study showed
institutional change implementation process to be a series of incremental planning
and implementation cycles. The second and subsequent cycles were based on the
experience of implementing previous cycles. If there is fairly stable staffing and a
consistent effort to continue implementation, then as cycle follows cycle the
context in which planning or implementation occurs becomes different from the
context that existed when the implementation process began. From one cycle to
the next, some or all of those involved now have experience and understanding of
the new practices that they did not have previously, which they can use to par-
ticipate more fully and/or help others to do so during next implementation cycle.
If this is so, wherever possible it would be wise for national policy makers to:
try to maximize the stability of any ministry or other national-level

personnel that they make responsible for the ongoing support and/or
monitoring and/or evaluation of the change-implementation process. This
can be a major problem in political contexts in which a change of minister or
of government also means a change of all senior civil servants.
Similarly, local planners need to:
recognize the importance of maintaining stable staffing among those leading

and implementing educational changes within all affected local
administrative and educational institutions.
A final consequence of the long timescales involved relates to the experiences of

the implementers. Throughout the many planning-implementation cycles out-
lined above, case-study implementers invested a great deal of personal effort in
becoming more confident practitioners. Maintaining the necessary levels of effort
can be very tiring and stressful. High levels of initial enthusiasm can make it
possible for implementation to begin. However, even if implementers are sup-
ported in becoming more professionally confident over time, their enthusiasm for
continuing to make the effort to become as adept at, and confident about, the new
change practices is likely to diminish after a while. This will certainly be the case
if too much change is expected too quickly, if there is insufficient time for con-
solidation of new skills, or if the ‘hygiene factors’ (Carey and Dabor 1995) of the
job, the salary, working conditions and interpersonal relationships are not per-
ceived as satisfactory.
3YP implementers in the case-study institution faced constant demands for pro-
fessional change throughout the implementation stage, as it gradually became
clearer how the imported ‘reflective teacher’ model of the curriculum needed to be
adjusted to meet local expectations. There was little explicit acknowledgement of
the efforts they were making by leaders at any level. There was no point at which
they could relax and feel they had reached a point at which they felt comfortable
with their professional expertise without further changes being expected of them.
There was no chance to stop for a while. As the implementation process pro-
gressed, the value of their initially adequate salary was whittled away by inflation
and they had to find other work, which they had to fit around their very
demanding primary job. The lack of obvious appreciation of their efforts, together
with the accumulated stress and tiredness, diminished enthusiasm for change
considerably, as one staff member made clear:
I think people here at the start were very enthusiastic, saving the world. Now
it’s broken to smithereens. We’ve ended up a bunch of disillusioned people.
Now professionalism appears but enthusiasm is gone. (Ibid. 223)
If change implementers are to continue to actively implement, both national
policy makers and local-change leaders need to consider how they can:
balance periods of active change planning and implementation with periods

during which implementers have time to consolidate what has already been
achieved
make sure that where genuine effort is being demanded from implementers
over time, they feel that their efforts are appreciated both by overt
encouragement and by close attention to the above ‘hygiene factors’
5.4.3 Successful change requires genuine devolution
I have frequently mentioned policy makers’ tendency to see educational change as

merely a matter of expecting or requiring teachers to carry out what has been
legislated for on paper in a uniform manner and at uniform speed across the
country. Policy makers in strongly hierarchical, top-down, organizational cultures
such as the one illustrated in the case study are likely to find it hard to conceive of
educational change as an open, variable and unpredictable process, whose outcomes
can rarely be predicted in any detail.
However, even in organizational cultures that claim to be genuinely more
decentralized, national policy makers still tend to expect educational change
implementation to be a uniform process. By emphasizing the expectation of
universal predictable outcomes, they make it difficult for local-level change leaders
to genuinely consider local realities. This makes it more likely that successful
large-scale change will remain as elusive as ever.
5.4.4 Use of ‘off the shelf’ models
It is frequently the case that national change leaders who are themselves not clear
about how to implement a change that they wish to introduce are tempted to turn
to imported models that appear to offer instant solutions. In the above case it was
not actually the policy makers who imported the model that informed the
development of the 3YP curriculum, since they entirely ignored the question of
how the change was to be implemented.
The responsibility for choosing a model on which to base implementation
planning was thus taken by the institutional leadership of the first 3YP in the
capital. Overall, their willingness to actually make a decision was probably a
blessing since it provided a starting point for implementation planning in all
provincial 3YP institutions. However, one effect of importing a teacher-education
model developed for use in one cultural setting (the capital) into other cultural
settings (the 3YP case study and other 3 YP settings) was to make the imple-
mentation process more complex in many such settings, since implementers had to
discover which aspects could, and which could not, be made to ‘fit’ the expecta-
tions of the existing educational environment through trial and error.
If policy makers wish to use an imported model to support their understanding
of the educational change they wish to implement, they need to:
have a clear idea of what they hope that the proposed changes will achieve
be clear that the claimed outcomes of any ‘off the shelf model’ that they
intend to use do actually substantially overlap with what they want to
achieve
be clear about the main cultural norms and material conditions presupposed
by the imported model
carry out a baseline study of the current ‘cultures’ of their society, their
education system and those who work in it, and of the conditions that are
normal in affected classrooms
understand which features of the model are more or less likely to be
acceptable to/fit the material conditions of the current system
emphasize those features that are likely to be less difficult for people to
accept/operationalize in the initial stages of the implementation process, and
think about the extent to which the other features may be introduced later
5.4.5 Successful experience of change makes continuation more likely
An actual example of a successful change initiative can be a powerful aid to

convincing those who are resistant to, or sceptical of, the value of a proposed
change. The fact that a noticeable proportion of the 3YP case-study trainees going
into schools received good feedback from supervising teachers and school leaders,
made it more difficult for the previously sceptical leaders of the university English
faculty to ignore the ideas emanating from the 3YP, and the skills of 3YP staff
who understood how these ideas could be incorporated into a teacher-training
curriculum.
The lived experience of the implementation process, the perception of which
aspects of change do or do not work in the context, and do or do not add benefit to
the existing way of doing things, will influence what aspects of change ‘continue’,
in the sense of eventually becoming existing norms of an education system or some
of the institutions within it. Such perceptions of benefit may be both professional
and purely pragmatic. In the 3YP case-study environment, therefore, the English
faculty took decisions about which aspects of the programme to incorporate into
the existing five-year programme on both grounds. For example, devolving
responsibility for the teacher-training component of the course to the 3YP staff
represented both an acknowledgement of their greater skill and understanding of
this aspect of their professional responsibilities, and relief that few faculty staff
would now have to be responsible for something that they had never been keen to
engage in, namely teacher training.
5.4.6 The value of collaboration and mutual aid
Some of the 3YP case-study staff’s most positive memories of the implementation
process relate to the opportunities that existed for them to meet colleagues from
other 3YP institutions who were working to try to implement the same change
aims. They found such meetings valuable both personally and professionally.
Personally they valued the opportunity to make ongoing contact with others with
whom they could discuss their worries and uncertainty, and professionally it was
useful to hear about and learn from how other institutions were approaching the
solution of the many implementation challenges.
This suggests that policy makers should plan implementation in a manner that:
recognizes the value of supporting implementers through enabling regular

structured opportunities for them to meet, discuss and learn from each other.
5.4.7 Trained teachers are only part of any successful educational-

change process
Good teacher training is one key aspect of enabling change to reach the classroom.
However, while change cannot reach classrooms without ‘qualified teachers’, other
factors also influence what happens in classrooms. If either the prevailing educa-
tional culture or other components of the subject area (especially high-stakes
exams) are not in harmony with the teaching–learning principles underpinning
the change, then even if teachers have been well trained, it is almost certain that
many of the hoped-for positive effects of such training will fail to appear in the
majority of classrooms. Policy makers thus need to remember that:
the multiple variables that determine the nature of any education system are
interdependent. One variable cannot usually be changed without at least
thinking about how the change will affect its ‘fit’ with the others
Chapter 6
A change in teaching approach
6.1 The background to the change
In chapter 1 I introduced some common reasons why policy makers might decide
that an educational change is needed. One increasingly common reason is a per-
ception that an existing education system that emphasizes the transmission of a
body of learned knowledge to all learners is no longer adequate to enable them to
develop the skills they will need for life and employment in a rapidly globalizing
world. This case study looks at one aspect of an educational change that was
introduced for this reason.
As part of a wider national educational-change planning process involving the
development of new curricula covering all subjects, policy makers decided that the
approach used for the teaching of English in secondary schools needed to move
away from its existing grammar-translation emphasis towards a more ‘commu-
nicative’ teaching approach. This it was hoped would eventually result in learners
who not only knew about the language, but could also use the language, and so
enter higher education or employment with tangible skills that would be of value
both to them personally and to the wider community.
The policy change towards the implementation of new teaching approaches was
introduced without a great deal of obvious detailed planning by national policy
makers. There was no particular timescale attached to the change. Funding (for the
implementation of new approaches in English classrooms) was in the first instance
principally focused on providing in-service training for a relatively small pro-
portion (nationally) of ‘good’ existing teachers. There was no explicit statement as
to how such teachers should then be used, but since there were sanctions to ensure
that they returned to their original schools after training, there seemed to be an
implicit expectation that they would ‘cascade’ their new understandings and skills
down to institutional/local colleagues when they returned. Funding continued to
be available for the support of such training for well over ten years. In-service
training is the focus of the case in this chapter.
6.2 The initiation/planning stage
6.2.1 Leadership timescale and funding
The initial change planning did not include any changes to either the national
English textbooks used in each school nor the high-stakes English exams that
learners took at the end of their secondary-school studies. Neither was there any
immediate change in the pre-service teacher-education curriculum.
While central government kept firm control of the education system
throughout the change period, responsibility for planning the details of the in-
service training process was devolved partly to local-level education adminis-
trators/institutional leaders, who were responsible for deciding on which teachers
should be allowed to take the exam to compete to be sent for in-service training,
and partly to English departments at universities identified as being appropriate
providers of such training. As will become clear, neither national policy nor either
set of local leaders seem to have felt any responsibility for what happened once the
training was completed.
Can you identify any inconsistencies in the change planning process as
described so far?
I notice the following:
the policy makers seem to have ignored the interconnectedness of the

different components that influence how any subject is taught. The aim is to
change the classroom teaching approach, but no plans have been made to
adjust textbooks, exams and initial teacher training to ‘fit’ the approach. This
is likely to negatively affect how the new approach is received if existing
materials cannot be used with the approach or it conflicts in any way with
success in high-stakes tests.
there does not seem to be a clear allocation of responsibility for ensuring that
leaders in the local environments (or in the university training departments)
develop systems that will enable returning teachers to share their new
understandings and skills with their colleagues. This may severely limit the
extent to which new understandings and skills can be disseminated more
widely.
6.2.2 Understanding the national and local change context
The existing approach to the teaching of English naturally reflected the main
features of the educational and organizational culture of the country. The orga-
nizational culture of the existing education system was extremely centralized, top
down and hierarchical. Classroom teachers were expected to teach a national
A change in teaching approach 91
curriculum according to strict guidelines regarding what should be taught when.

The educational culture had been more or less stable for many years, and had a very
clear concept of what knowledge, learning and teaching meant, and of the roles
and behaviours that were appropriate for teachers and learners. These existing roles
did not encourage autonomous, individual decision-making.
In terms of the perceived purpose of education and of the expected roles of
teachers and learners within the classroom, the educational culture was again
situated towards the ‘transmission’ end of Figure 3.1 on page 33. English teachers
taught a centralized curriculum using standardized nationally approved textbooks.
English classes were based around the detailed study and explanation of the
grammatical structures and vocabulary items that appeared in the texts that
formed the core of each unit. These in turn represented what was to be learned
from each class, the expectation being that new structures or vocabulary items
would be memorized by the learners before the next class, during which one or
more learners’ recall might be tested orally. Much or even most teaching was done
using the mother tongue, and use of English was largely restricted to completion
of the written grammar or vocabulary practice exercises that followed each text.
The new teaching approach proposed was, as in chapter 5, based on a model of
the language learning–teaching process imported from educational cultures that
assumed different material classroom conditions and different classroom beha-
viours from both teachers and learners. While the existing focus was on the
memorization of grammatical structures and vocabulary items in order to repro-
duce these correctly in low and high stakes tests, communicative approaches had
very different emphases. Classroom learners were to be exposed to a far wider range
of language inputs, in terms of reading and/or listening to texts, and expected to
understand and analyse these in far less detail than was traditionally the case. Such
texts’ purpose was often to serve as introductions to, or stimuli for, oral and
written classroom practice activities that would encourage learners to interact with
each other and/or the teacher using more or less guided/modelled language for
more or less realistic purposes. The explicit teaching of grammar and vocabulary
on which the existing method was based, and which provided teachers, learners
and parents with a clear measure of what had been learnt in each class, was given
less prominence. Instead, the majority of classroom time was to be spent on
activities with far less visible outcomes, involving exposing learners to examples of
the language being used for more or less real purposes and providing opportunities
for them to practise using their knowledge of English to comprehend and express
more or less real meanings.
What might existing English teachers find difficult or challenging about
adjusting their teaching to such an approach?
Some of the many difficulties/challenges might include the need to:
move away from the idea that teaching a language principally entails
providing learners with correct facts about the forms of the language
use more English in the classroom, to ‘manage’ and support the wider range
of classroom language-use activities
move beyond ‘lecturing’ about the language to develop a more flexible set of
teaching behaviours suitable for supporting a wider range of activities
develop techniques that will encourage learners who are used to listening to
the teacher to participate actively in practice activities
rethink how to assess learners to include some assessment of performance as
well as of knowledge
develop strategies and skills to adapt and adjust existing materials to provide
learners with different types of learning activity
English teachers were in short supply nationally. Their salaries were poor and
economic changes in the more developed parts of the country meant that proficient
English speakers could find alternative, better-paying employment quite easily.
While the country had a very centralized education system and a widely shared set
of norms underpinning its educational culture, there was considerable economic
variation between different regions. Policy makers decided to use the case-study
in-service training programme to try and support the professional development of
English teachers in less well-developed areas of the country, by giving teachers
from such areas priority on the in-service programmes.
Such regions of course also tended to have been less exposed to economic and
social changes and therefore to be more conservative in their educational and
organizational cultures. The ‘reculturing’ required of teachers from these areas
would thus be greater and need considerable time. There is no evidence that
national policy makers encouraged university staff in the more developed areas
where the programmes were situated to bear trainees’ backgrounds in mind by
trying to build elements of ‘cultural continuity’ (Holliday 2001) into their pro-
grammes. Nor did they advise educational leaders in trainees’ home regions about
how they might prepare to receive and use the trained teachers when they
returned.
If teachers from less-developed regions were to be successfully trained in the
new approaches, their teacher educators needed to be people who understood and
were able to explain and demonstrate use of the new approaches themselves.
National policy makers appeared to recognize the need for ‘qualified’ trainers, since
they situated the training programmes at a small number of well-known and
prestigious language-teaching universities across the country where understanding
of the ideas underlying the new teaching approaches and familiarity with the
associated teaching techniques was likely to be greatest.
6.2.3 Clarity of expectations
The introduction of a new approach to the teaching of English was part of a wider
educational-change policy that aimed to begin to adjust the outcomes of secondary
education, in terms of the understanding and skills that learners were equipped
with by the time they left school. A new language curriculum did in very general
terms present an outline of what was to be expected of learners in terms of

language knowledge and skills. However, the lack of detailed guidance and the
lack of parallel changes to textbooks and examinations suggests that at the
planning stage policy makers had not yet fully identified what the intended
outcomes of the change, of which the in-service training was part, should be.
To be eligible to apply for the in-service programmes, secondary teachers
needed to have a college-level diploma, at least five years, English teaching
experience, and to be working in a school in named, less-developed, regions. To sit
for the entrance exam teachers had to be recommended by their institutional heads
and/or local-level educational administrators. The programmes lasted for two
years, during which trainees continued to be paid their teachers’ salaries. If they
passed the appropriate final exam (in all universities bar one, an exam specifically
written for them) they would obtain a BA degree. The courses were to include a
substantial language-development component, courses in the ideas about language
and learning underpinning communicative approaches and extensive methodolo-
gical inputs and practice opportunities
By situating programmes in prestigious universities, policy makers ensured that
participants would have kudos when they returned to their local areas. However,
no formal plans were made outlining whether, how and to whom their new skills
and understandings were to be communicated on their return, what role their in-
service training was supposed to play in enabling them to do so effectively, or how
the university training departments might contribute to the dissemination pro-
cess. Expectations of the change were therefore fuzzy in terms of the outcomes of
both the larger national change and of the case-study in-service programmes.
6.2.4 Conclusion
The planning stage of the case-study change was inconsistent in a number of ways.
On the one hand policy makers seemed to recognize certain crucial needs: the need
for the training to be long and thorough enough to be able to ‘reculture’ teachers
in the directions that the new approaches entailed, the need for training institu-
tions to have qualified teacher educators, and the need to try to ensure that the
benefits of the training provision was weighted towards areas where the need was
greatest.
On the other hand planners failed to communicate the rationale for either the
national or the specific English language-teaching case-study changes to local
educational leaders and the wider society. Nor did they consider the extent to
which there would need to be ‘reculturing’ outside as well as within the classroom
if the hoped-for new teaching approaches were to be implemented. They were
vague about how the training might be more widely disseminated, and their
failure to adjust teaching materials and examinations in parallel with the new
approach, almost guaranteed that any wider effects of the training programmes
would be diminished. This case therefore represents a further example of policy
makers’ lack of appreciation of the range of factors that may influence/be influ-
enced by a complex educational change.
6.3 The implementation of the change
The plans for implementing the case-study change were limited to the provision of
the in-service teacher training programmes outlined above. The local realities I
will discuss here are therefore those existing in:
the in-service teacher-training environment

the working environment to which the teachers returned after their
programme
6.3.1.1 The in-service teacher-training environment

The teachers who were successfully admitted to the in-service programmes were
from less-developed areas. They were older, less proficient at English and less
exposed to modern ideas than most other undergraduate students at the institu-
tions at which they studied. They came from more conservative backgrounds,
where the existing teaching and learning norms were most firmly entrenched.
They had been chosen to apply for a place on the programme as a result of their
perceived excellence as teachers using the existing grammar-translation-focussed
method. Their prior experience thus meant that the majority therefore arrived
with strong preconceptions about their role as students and very clear expectations
of their teachers.
The universities offering the programmes were in developed areas. They had
been chosen because their staff were thought to be most likely both to understand
the theories underpinning communicative approaches, and how to explain,
demonstrate and provide practise in the methodological techniques needed to
implement such approaches in classrooms. Language teaching for undergraduates
at these universities already showed signs of more communicative approaches.
Teachers used English in class for more of the time. Many teachers, while still
focusing on explicit teaching of grammar and vocabulary to some extent, had also
begun to develop new professional roles as organizers, managers and facilitators of
more or less linguistically controlled practice activities. Such teachers expected
their students to be far more proactive and participative than was the case in the
classrooms in which the trainees had previously been teaching.
How would newly arrived in-service trainees expect to be treated by their
teacher trainers?
How would the university staff expect their new ‘students’ to behave?
Can you see any mismatch?
The trainees arrived at the university bringing with them the assumptions about
language teaching and about teacher and learner roles that they had developed
through their prior teaching-learning experiences. They, as teachers who had been
using the traditional grammar-translation method in their classrooms for at least
five years and who had been granted the in-service training opportunity as a result
of their success in doing so, expected to be taught more or less as they had been
teaching. They expected the university teachers to take full charge of what was to
be learned in the classroom, and to teach both English and the theories and
practices of communicative-teaching approaches in the same manner and with the
same detail and thoroughness as they had always taught English in their class-
rooms. As learners they expected to be told what to do, to have new language
points or professional ideas fully explained, in their mother tongue if necessary,
and to receive a clear correct answer to any question they might pose.
The university staff, on the other hand, viewed their responsibilities differently.
They were already more familiar with different teaching approaches. Their lan-
guage teaching materials were different from those that the trainees had been used
to using in their school classrooms. For example, the trainees as teachers had been
used to explaining small amounts of English reading text in great detail and with
great concern for how language forms were used to express meaning. As students
they were now presented with far greater quantities, and more varied types, of
written and listening texts, which they were expected to process for general
meaning, without necessarily having new structures and/or vocabulary explained
or being told exactly what they should learn from them.
The two sides were situated at significantly different points along the broadly
conceived continuum of educational cultures (see Figure 3.1 on page 33). The
differences were so great that both sides felt the other was failing to carry out their
teacher or student roles appropriately. As one trainee saw it in the university-
learning context:
. . . there is such a kind of vagueness which confuses me, it’s like walking in
the air. In the past the teacher explained everything to us, the clear gram-
matical rules, the explanation of vocabulary and simple memorisation made
us feel confident and easy. It seemed I had learned all the knowledge the
teacher taught us. (Ouyang 2000: 405)
The trainees/students felt that the teachers were not doing their job properly. They
were not explaining unknown items in the text, but asking them to infer from
context. They were not telling them what the correct answer to each question or
the correct outcome to each activity was, suggesting that there could be more than
one correct answer or conclusion. They did not give them specific items to
memorize and learn and so at the end of a class it was not clear what the purpose of
the class had been and what had actually been achieved. The teachers/teacher
trainers conversely felt that the students/trainees were unwilling to make decisions
for themselves, reluctant to participate in classroom language and/or practise
teaching activities, unable to approach problems independently and over-reliant
on the guidance of the teacher.
Each side’s expectations were therefore initially unfulfilled. However, since the
trainees perceived themselves as (and were perceived to be) students in the uni-
versity setting, it was they who had, over time, to adjust to the teaching
approaches and culture of the training environment. Over their two years of study
they therefore went through a process of personal and professional reculturing as
they developed the confidence to start making teaching and learning decisions for
themselves, and the ability to independently analyse and develop solutions to
teaching and learning problems that they encountered. As one of them reported:
Now I have learned to judge, to decide, to act, to do everything I should do as
soon as possible and all by myself. And I think if I am facing another great
change in my life I will certainly be able to make a more active response. For
the training has helped me to form an excellent ability in analysing things
and solving problems. I have learned to rely on myself, to make full use of my
ability, and to seize any opportunity. (Ouyang 2000: 409)
Most did eventually succeed in graduating successfully after their two years of
study. The length of the training was fully vindicated. However, even so, making
the transition from being a teacher who had full mastery of the knowledge and
professional skills needed to successfully transmit a stable, unchanging, defined
body of language knowledge to learners, to a teacher who felt fairly confident
about their own language proficiency, about the rationale for their teaching
approach and about their professional ability to help learners begin to develop
their own language skills, represented a great challenge.
6.3.1.2 The trainees’ working environment

I have already said that there appeared to be no consideration at the planning stage
of what trainees would do when they returned to their schools. Consequently.
there had been no attempt to raise awareness of how the trainees might have
changed and how such changes might be used for the benefit of education in the
local area, among leaders, colleagues, learners or parents in their home environ-
ments. In 6.3.1.1 I explained that there was an initial clash between trainee and
trainer expectations due to their very different prior experiences. Since those
remaining in the trainees’ original working environment had had little or no
reason to alter any of their beliefs and behaviours while the trainees had been away,
the stage was set for a further mismatch of expectations on their return.
How might the graduating teachers returning to their working environment
now differ personally and/or professionally from teachers who had remained
behind?
How might local leaders, teaching colleagues and learners react to any such
differences?
How might returned trainees feel?
Most graduating teachers returned to their working environments different in

many ways. Personally they had experienced living in a big city in a developed
part of the country for two years. They would have had many new experiences, and
met a wide range of different people and been exposed to many new ideas. Their
view of the possibilities available to them would have been altered to a greater or
lesser extent. Professionally they had begun to develop characteristics more similar
to those working on the ‘interpretation’ side of Figure 3.1 (see page 33). They
returned as teachers who were more confident in their language proficiency and
more able than they had been previously to make decisions about what and how to
teach. They were also, to differing degrees, now aware of the need for, and able to
manage and organize the provision of, an English classroom in which learners had
at least some opportunity to interact.
Educational and institutional leaders and colleagues who had remained at home
retained the characteristics of the more ‘transmission-based’ educational culture
that had characterized the returning teachers before they left. Insofar as they had
thought about what to expect of those excellent teachers whom they had sent for
further training, they could only expect them to be as they had been before they
left (excellent ‘transmission oriented’ teachers), only even better after two years
spent studying at a prestigious university.
Instead however, many trainees who returned were now teachers who no longer
fitted the norms of the working context or indeed the immediate wider society.
Some were teachers who now tried to use mostly English to teach English, which
some colleagues interpreted as ‘showing off’ or which learners said they could not
understand. Some tried hard to encourage learners to begin to interact in English
in the classroom, causing noise and so potential disruption to their colleagues.
Many trainees, when they first returned at least, tried to lessen the almost exclusive
classroom focus on study of the forms of the language. Without this focus their
learners’ results in the ‘knowledge-based’ examinations were no longer so high.
Parents were disappointed and questioned the learning value and cultural
appropriacy of encouraging their children to spend time using the language
in class. School leaders and educational administrators, whose original nomination
of the returned teachers had often been based on their ability to obtain good
exam results, now faced teachers for whom exam results were no longer necessarily
the main criterion of good teaching, and who sometimes made unsolicited
suggestions and independent decisions about how to teach. This challenged
(albeit in a very minor manner) the existing top-down organizational culture, and
so could seem aggressive and threatening to the harmony of the institution. The
following quote shows what one teacher experienced on returning to her original
school:
After all we have done . . . we were ready to apply our skills . . . to our
workplace in our hometown. We soon discovered a huge gap between our
vision and social reality. Traditional ELT methods . . . have prevailed for so
many years. We used CLT (communicative language teaching) methodologies
and tried our best to make the classroom activities as interactive as possible,
but I got negative feedback suggesting that CLT produced students who
could ‘only speak loud in class but scratch their heads in tests and exams’. It
was as difficult as cutting out a path from a pile of rocks (Ibid. 410).
How would you expect returning teachers to feel when confronted with such
responses?
I think that many of them might have:
felt confused about what the point of the whole training programme
experience had been. Why spend two years studying and learning new skills
if nobody appreciates them, and in fact finds them threatening?
felt resentful/angry that after all the effort they had made during the training
to try and make the professional changes that were expected, now nobody is
interested
become reluctant to continue to make much effort to use their under-
appreciated new skills and reverted to the status quo
begun to think about leaving teaching entirely and using their English skills
in some other workplace, or leaving teaching in the local environment and
going somewhere where their skills would be more valued
Once again the trainees found themselves out of step with the prevailing
educational culture, as is simply illustrated in Figure 6.1.
Figure 6.1 Trainee ‘fit’ with their study and working environments
Exact positions along the continuum are less important than the demonstration of
the cultural ‘gap’ between the trainees and their trainers (at the start of the in-
service programme), and the returning teachers and their leaders, colleagues and
learners (when they came home). As is clear, this gap was significant throughout.
Such a gap and the potential for cultural and personal uncertainty that it
engenders is extremely stressful for any implementer. Such stress, compounded by
the clear lack of appreciation for their implementation efforts, did little to enable
the understandings and skills developed during the change efforts (in line with the
national policy change) to influence the returning teachers’ institutional or wider
local environment.
6.3.2 Support for learning the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of change
One could argue that those teachers who had the opportunity to attend the in-
service programmes were well supported. Despite the universities’ lack of sensi-
tivity towards the experiences that trainees arrived with, discussed in 6.3.1.1, the
programme length, their own hard work and the generally ‘qualified’ trainers
meant that many did graduate with an understanding of, and an ability to use
different approaches to, the teaching and learning English.
However, those who had sent them were not helped to understand either the
‘what’ or the ‘why’ of the changes to teaching that new national policies hoped to
introduce, nor ‘how’ trainees might be used to support local implementation of
such policy on their return. Similarly, no effort was made to alert the universities
to the need for them to work with trainees on contextually appropriate strategies
for introducing aspects of the new approaches into schools and classrooms in their
local areas in unthreatening ways. Ultimately this lack of concern with wider
implementation of the hoped-for change meant that in many local contexts the
opportunity to implement what had been learned from the in-service programmes
was minimal. The investment in the training thus resulted in the provision of
usually only one or two potential change agent(s) within each local county or city
district. As we have seen, if they remained in their original workplace, they were
likely (initially at least) to be frustrated by their leaders’ and colleagues’ lack of
interest in their new skills and understandings, and so at the lack of effect they
were able to have on English teaching in their institutions and/or immediate wider
environments. Consequently, many left.
6.3.3 Leadership of the change process
As in the previous case study, national policy makers did little to lead the change
process after their initial decision to encourage the development of more learner-
centred teaching approaches. Given the complexity of the proposed change for the
existing educational culture, there was a lack of appropriate leadership at all levels.
Lack of preparation for, and clarity about, the dissemination process at the national
leadership level inevitably resulted (given the top-down organizational culture) in
a lack of clarity and a failure to prepare among leaders at the local level. Conse-
quently, in most local contexts the potential benefits of the investment made in
training were underexploited.
Since the case-study programme ended, national policy makers have continued
to try to implement the introduction of new approaches to the teaching and
learning of English and other school subjects. New national English textbooks,
which do reflect the recommended more ‘communicative’-language teaching–
learning approaches, have been developed and are in use in all schools. Adjust-
ments have also been made to the content and weighting of what is tested in high
stakes exams to try to reinforce the message that learners should develop their
language skills as well as their language knowledge. These measures, together with
the ever-increasing recognition across society that education needs to enable
learners to develop new skills if they are to participate fully in the continuing
economic and social development, have helped to raise awareness of the value of
new English-teaching–learning approaches among local administrators, educa-
tional leaders, teachers and parents. Case-study teachers returning to their working
environments today would probably have a more welcoming reception.
6.4 What does this case tell us about the educational-change

process?
The themes that emerge from this case reinforce many ideas that have been
discussed previously.
6.4.1 Trained teachers are only part of any successful educational

change process
Complex educational change can require a ‘reculturing’ process to take place, albeit
to differing degrees among the different groups affected by the change. In this
case, while unusually realistic provision was made for the reculturing of the tea-
chers who would ultimately be expected to implement new teaching approaches in
their classroom, no provision at all was made for those they had left behind,
leading to the problems outlined in 6.3.1.2 above when they returned to their
home environments.
This is a reminder that successful implementation of any such change depends
fundamentally not only on how teachers think and behave, but also on the thinking
and behaviour of a range of other people within and outside the education system.
The more complex the change is, the more essential it is that national and local
change leaders spend time at the implementation-planning stage considering who
will be affected and how they can be helped to understand the main features of the
change, why it is desirable and the part they can play in supporting it.
6.4.2 The components that affect the teaching of any subject are
interconnected
This case also re-emphasizes the need for national policy makers to remember and
take account of the interconnectedness of the various components that influence
the teaching of any subject. Planning how to train teachers in the ‘what’, ‘why’ and
‘how’ of whatever change it is hoped to implement, is clearly one very important
aspect of any change process. However, again, teachers are not the only influence
on what happens in classrooms. As the returning teachers discovered, exams
(and also materials) can be just as influential, and lack of harmony between
teacher training, teaching approach, materials and exams will make change-
implementation more difficult.
There seem often to be political, practical and/or economic reasons that make it
difficult for all components to be made simultaneously consistent with the pro-
posed change. If that is so, as in the current case, any teacher training needs to
explicitly recognize this, since it has implications for the content of the training.
For example, in the above case, textbooks and exams were not changed to ‘fit’ the
new teaching approaches. It would have been helpful, therefore, for teacher trainers
to have spent time with trainees developing strategies for using the textbooks they
were already familiar with in different ways, to try to enable them to give their
learners at least some of the learning experiences appropriate for a more com-
municative approach.
6.4.3 Legislating for change does not mean it happens
The mistaken notion that plans for change officially announced on paper inevitably
translate to their implementation in classrooms is again suggested here. Even
though detailed planning for dissemination was non-existent, there still seemed to
be an assumption that trainees would return to their working environments and
have an effect (a positive effect in the sense of the contributing to the desired
outcome of a new teaching approach) on colleagues in the local area.
6.4.4 The more deeply entrenched an educational culture is, the

longer any significant reculturing process will take
The complexity of an educational change depends partly on the degree of personal

and/or professional adjustment that those involved need to make in order to move
from existing behaviours and understandings to those needed to begin imple-
mentation. A further factor that will affect the rate and route of change within an
educational setting is the depth and strength of the existing educational culture.
In this case, some aspects of the educational culture (particularly the expected roles
of teachers and learners in classrooms) were very longstanding, and were therefore
deeply etched into people’s ‘key meanings’ (see chapter 1.3) In such circumstances
an educational change that demands a degree of reculturing is likely to take even
longer to reach the continuation stage where the ‘change’ becomes a new cultural
norm. In addition, where such a deeply seated existing culture exists, it becomes
particularly important for national and local policy makers to plan for imple-
mentation in a manner that tries to provide a degree of ‘cultural continuity’
(Holliday op cit). This may mean planning for implementation in stages that
allow ‘bridges’ to be built between the status quo and the proposed educational
change. In this context, an example of such a bridge might have been to plan first
to introduce new techniques and types of activity related to the teaching of
reading, since dealing with text was already something that all teachers and
learners were familiar with.
Chapter 7
Introducing a new subject in primary school
7.1 The background to the change
This case is a further example of educational change that was introduced to meet a
perceived need for the outcomes of the national education system to better meet
the demands of a rapidly changing wider world. Over the past two decades
national policy makers in many countries have considered an adequate level of
proficiency in English to be an increasingly important educational outcome for
learners in their state systems. In many countries on all continents dissatisfaction
with the existing outcomes of English teaching have led policy makers to decide
that the learning of English should begin earlier. This case is an example of one
such decision to move to introduce English, previously taught only in secondary
schools, at primary level.
Again, the education system involved was highly centralized, top down and
hierarchical. The change was introduced without wide national consultation, with
local-educational planners/administrators instructed by the centre to ensure that
English began to be taught in the third year of all the primary schools for which
they were responsible by a set date. A very general outline curriculum was pro-
vided for each of the two ‘levels’ at primary school, and it was officially stated that
English should not be formally assessed. The case reported on here discusses the
first stages of one region’s attempt to try to prepare to implement this national
policy. The case reports on a two-year period covering the planning for, and very
early implementation of, the national change in one region of the country. The
actual implementation process continues to the present day.
Introducing a new subject in primary school 103
7.2 The initiation/planning stage
7.2.1 Leadership timing and funding
The timescale that national policy makers gave for the introduction of English at
primary level was about two years. This may seem quite a long time. However, the
majority of primary schools had never offered English (although some in big cities
already did), and there were therefore few primary English teacher trainers, few
primary English teachers and few primary English materials. There was also little
understanding of the rationale for the change or its implications for teaching
approaches among most of those leading, working in, or attending primary schools
or among parents in the wider society. There was therefore a lot to do in the time
available
Policy makers in the case study region recognized the need to plan for imple-
mentation in this context. Given the magnitude of the task, they decided to begin
by trying to deal with one of the most fundamental of the above shortages.
If you were responsible for beginning preparations to implement this
change, where would you start?
Regional policy makers chose to begin by developing a group of primary English

trainer-trainers, who would understand the main differences between Teaching
English to Young Learners (TEYL) and teaching teenagers or adults, understand
what classroom conditions were needed to support TEYL and be familiar with
some key techniques for enabling such learning to take place. Members of this
group would then, it was originally planned, be available to provide both further
trainer- training and teacher training and so enable the region to rapidly expand
the number of primary English teachers. It was decided that the initial training of
the core trainer-trainer groups would last three months and would take place at a
British university with recognized expertise in TEYL.
The case-study region was relatively prosperous. Policy makers recognized that
the trainer-training programme would require both on-going funding and their
continuing involvement in the planning of the trainer-training project, its
implementation and in how trainers would be used thereafter. You will probably
have noticed that in this case the commitment to ongoing leadership involvement
at both planning and implementation stages represents a contrast to the two
previous studies.
7.2.2 Understanding the national and local change context
The region involved in this case had very uneven social and economic develop-
ment. Parts of the region were well developed and economically affluent, and in
some schools in some urban areas primary English teaching had already been
provided for several years. Other parts of the region, the majority, were more
representative of the picture outlined at 7.2.1 above. It was recognized by regional

planners that if the UK trainer-training programme was to be of value, it was
important for the UK side to have some sense of context, and so a one-week,
baseline study visit was made by a member of staff from the project university.
Such baseline studies, in which information can be gathered about existing
realities in the proposed change context to inform planning, do, as I have pre-
viously mentioned, have great potential value, even if they are only short and
relatively superficial. The visit in this case enabled factual information about the
proposed implementation to be gathered, for example what number of primary
teachers will need training, how many hours of English teaching per week there
will be, and whether and how it will be assessed. It was also an opportunity to
obtain examples of primary textbooks that were already being used, and the
outline primary curriculum and other relevant documents. However, the value of
such studies can be greatly diminished if, as often happens for understandable but
unhelpful reasons when outsiders are involved, the contexts that the baseline study
uses as its baseline are examples of existing ‘best practice’ rather than examples of
conditions in more typical baseline institutions. This was the case here.
What relevant contextual information was such a baseline-study visit likely
to miss?
What effects might the lack of accurate contextual information have on the
design and/or content of proposed trainer-training programme and/or the
wider implementation process?
Some of the contextual information that was missed was a sense of the:
class sizes that most teachers would be working with

conditions in most classrooms in terms of space and flexibility of seating
resources that would be available to support teaching in most schools
extent to which there was awareness of the change among school leaders and
parents and/or whether it would be welcomed when it was implemented
pressure that there would be to formally assess English learning
extent to which generally accepted TEYL activities and techniques would
conflict with the existing primary-school educational culture
Lack of such information might result in the proposed trainer-training

programme, for example:
spending time introducing, discussing and practising TEYL teaching

approaches techniques and activities that would not, for practical or cultural
reasons, be feasible in normal classroom conditions, instead of working with
trainers to think about how the most important ideas could be adapted to
become possible to implement in a range of likely classroom realities
spending too little time developing simple explanations of the rationale for
TEYL and its main classroom principles, and developing/practising ways of
presenting them to teachers, local-level administrators, school leaders and/or

parents
For reasons of partial ignorance on the part of the UK training providers, and
perhaps reluctance to highlight the scale and complexity of what region-wide
implementation implied on the part of the regional policy makers, important
aspects of the context were not sufficiently considered at the planning stage. This
affected the design of the trainer-training programme, which then in turn affected
the extent to which the teacher training that was provided by trainers on their
return could actually be implemented (see 7.3.1.2 below).
7.2.3 Clarity of expectations
The concrete expectation of the national change was that by a given date all
primary schools would be offering at least some English teaching to all learners.
What this concrete expectation would in fact mean in classroom practice was of
course far less clear, given the very sketchy curriculum guidelines provided by
national policy makers and the variations in existing primary-school English-
teaching practice and understanding between and within the different regions. As
in previous cases, national policy makers seemed content to introduce the official
change and then ‘require’ lower levels of the organizational/administrative hier-
archy to develop concrete plans for implementation.
At the regional level the expectations expressed by the leadership were that the
trainers who went to the UK should study for a formal accredited university
qualification and should be able to train others in TEYL when they returned.
What advantages and disadvantages might there be to linking a context-
specific training course to an existing formal academic qualification?
A perceived advantage, which strongly influenced the regional planners, was

a sense that the qualification would increase the value they were obtaining for
their substantial financial investment. First, linking the training to a
qualification would motivate participants to take the training seriously, since
failure to achieve the qualification would be clearly visible, and so
embarrassing. Second, having a formal qualification would add to the
trainers’ credibility on their return, and so help make it more likely that they
would be taken seriously when providing training to others.
A disadvantage, which became clear during the actual provision of the
training, was that the need to teach towards a qualification constrained what
was and was not possible during the training. Significant time had to be
spent on developing the academic skills needed to complete the written
assignments against which successful achievement of the qualification would
be judged. Such time might have been better used developing more practical
professional training skills.
Apart from the desire that trainers should obtain a recognized qualification,
there was no clarity at the initial planning stage about exactly how the trainers
would be used when they returned. There was an assumption that they would train
others in the principles of TEYL, but who would be trained, when and where they
would be trained, how long the training would be and how it would be structured
were not clear. More definite decisions regarding trainers’ post-return roles were
made once the first (of four) groups were actually in the UK. These decisions
remained unchanged for the later groups, and so could be taken account of by the
training institution when working with later groups.
The UK training institution had considerable experience of working with
international colleagues, and the content of the Certificate programme that the
trainers were to follow was more or less defined. It was planned that study for the
Certificate would run over two of the three months, with the final month being
spent on the development of TEYL training materials and on trainer-training.
There was, however, concern on the part of both the regional leaders and the UK
institution about ensuring that most participants would be people whose existing
roles had some sort of a training remit within the existing regional or local
structure and would therefore be appropriately situated to ‘train’ on their return.
In addition, since they would be studying for an accredited and assessed qualifi-
cation, it was necessary that their English language should be at a level that would
allow them to do so.
In order to be able to select appropriate participants, it was therefore agreed that
the UK institution would provide two two-week introductory courses in the
change environment. Over 100 possible participants would attend each. Face-to-
face interaction with, and observation of, participants, together with information
on the above two criteria, provided an approximate sense of who seemed to be
suited for the longer training programme. Most eventual participants were
therefore either existing local-level teacher trainers, trainers from colleges spe-
cializing in the training of primary teachers or primary teachers considered to have
trainer potential. Although there were representatives from all parts of the region,
the majority came from the more-developed areas and had some prior TEYL
experience.
7.2.4 Conclusion
Compared to the two previous cases, the regional leadership in this case did take an
active interest in the planning of the trainer-training initiative that they hoped
would provide significant support for the implementation of national policy.
However, in two main areas here too the planning process had important gaps.
First, although the partial baseline study that was carried out was worth doing, the
fact that it did not really investigate the full ‘baseline’ meant that it failed to
register a number of important contextual issues that would later negatively affect
the implementation process. Second, although it did quite soon become clear how
the trainers would be used immediately after their return home, there was no real
planning of how they might be used over time to support the on-going imple-
mentation process region-wide. This, as will be seen below, resulted in the under-
utilization of a potentially significant resource.
7.3 The implementation of the change
I discuss this aspect of the change-implementation process from two points of

view. The first relates to the trainer-training aspect of the case study. The second
considers the extent to which the training offered by trainers on their return was
appropriate to the local realities of the primary teachers being trained.
7.3.1.1 The trainer training
As discussed above, the insistence that the training should be linked to a formal
qualification meant that more time needed to be spent on issues relating to the
academic aspects than would otherwise have been necessary. Nonetheless, this was
an essentially practical qualification, which over the first two months discussed the
main principles underlying the teaching of languages to young learners, the
rationale for these and demonstrated and practised some of the most widely used
classroom techniques and activities for operationalizing such principles. The
course of study tried to make connections to local realities as far as it was able, for
example through reference to participants’ prior experiences of their context and
the use of local textbooks. However, due both to lack of time and lack of baseline
information, this part of the programme was not able to spend sufficient time on
considering the implications of contextual realities on what was being learned in
any detail.
The final month of the programme had two main foci. By the time the first
group had reached this point, the regional planners had decided that each
returning group would be responsible for running a three-week training pro-
gramme for up to 800 existing and potential primary-school English teachers in
whatever holiday period followed their return. The first focus was therefore to
develop a set of training materials that they could use on such programmes. The
second was to help them develop training skills that would enable them to use the
training materials as effectively as possible. This dual focus represented an enor-
mous demand, especially for the first group of trainers who had to design the
training materials from scratch.
If you had been a member of this first group of trainers, on what would you
have based the design of such materials?
Unsurprisingly the first group of trainers returned first to the notes, handouts,
readings and examples of materials and activities that they had gathered during
the previous two months, to serve as a basis for their training materials. These had
been designed for the purpose of helping trainers understand the theory and
practice of TEYL. They were not, especially in an undigested and unadapted form,
necessarily appropriate for the three-week training course that the trainers would
be expected to provide for teachers from all over the region on their return.
However, given the time constraints on the first group, and their need to produce
training materials together with necessary handouts, textbook examples and
visuals for use with teachers very shortly after they returned, they naturally used
the resources that were most immediately available. For the first group, most of
the time during the last month had to be spent preparing materials to a very tight
deadline. Too little time was available for discussing and practising how, as
trainers, they might best organize and manage the presentation of ideas, the
opportunities for discussion, the personal modelling and the teacher practice of
TEYL activities that the materials offered. The three groups that followed were
more fortunate in two ways. First, they were able to use this first draft set of
training materials as a starting point for adaptation. Second, by the time they came
to the UK, almost all of them had already had experience of using the materials/
seeing the materials in use on real training programmes (see 7.3.2.2). Conse-
quently they were also able to spend more time developing and practising trainer
skills.
Over time the staff working on the UK training course also became aware of
more aspects of the trainers’ realities. Through participation in the teacher-
training programmes (see below) staff had greater exposure to what the trainers
were being expected to do on their return (the training context in terms of
numbers, facilities, intensity, prior knowledge of participants), the aspects of
training that they found most difficult, and the classroom reality of the teachers
whom they were training. Given the constraints outlined above, such under-
standings affected both the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of subsequent cycles of the UK-
based training.
7.3.1.2 The TEYL teacher training
The whole purpose of the trainer-training was of course to enable the provision of
the TEYL teacher training that would in turn enable the regional planners to meet
the demands of national educational policy. The form that this teacher training
took was a series of teacher-training programmes arranged for the summer and
winter holidays immediately following the return home of each group of trainers.
Each programme was residential over three weeks, with 12 working days spent on
the formal training. Each programme had approximately 800 teachers divided into
20–25 classes of 30–40 teachers. Each trainer was responsible for one class. In
order to lessen the burden, and more importantly to provide future trainers with
exposure to the training process, trainers from subsequent groups were expected to
attend the programme immediately prior to their departure for the UK, to work as
an assistant to one of the newly returned trainers. In addition, to provide further

support to the trainers and to gain first-hand experience of the teacher-training
context, two staff members from the UK training programme also participated in
each training programme.
The programme content was based on the materials developed by the trainers
during their time in the UK. These materials were in turn based on the content of
the UK programme, albeit increasingly adjusted over time in terms of weighting,
examples and materials in the light of experience. TEYL theory is based on ideas
about how children learn, how they learn language and what characteristics com-
mon to children everywhere imply for the sorts of activities that help them learn.
Some of the principles introduced in the teacher-training programme were there-
fore likely to be broadly familiar to any participant who had been trained in the
teaching of, or had experience of working with, young children. The outline
national curriculum also supported many of the principles of TEYL by emphasizing
the need for English learning in primary school to focus on activities that, for
example, asked children to use English to play games, listen to stories, sing songs,
or watch cartoons without the stress of being subjected to formal assessment.
However, the educational culture of which teachers attending the programme
were part (together with their school leaders, their colleagues, their learners and
their learners’ parents) remained towards the transmission end of the continuum
proposed in Figure 3.1 (see page 33). This meant that language learning at all
levels was viewed as a process that must involve learning tangible knowledge and
being assessed on the this learning, which in the case of language meant grammar
and vocabulary. A three-week training programme could not alone hope to
completely change such beliefs and their associated teaching behaviours.
In 7.2.2 above I mentioned some of the features of the primary-teaching contest
that the baseline study had failed to identify. A short survey (Wedell 2005)
responded to by 511 of the teachers attending the third teacher-training pro-
gramme, showed that these features did for many teachers represent barriers to the
local implementation of the less formal, meaning-focused and activity-centred
teaching approach that was introduced in the training programme. The teachers
were first asked whether they thought that the techniques/activities for developing
young learners’ language skills that had been introduced during the training could
be used in their primary English classrooms – 98.2 per cent of them said yes. They
were then asked whether there were any factors (apart from their own lack of
experience or lack of confidence) that might make it difficult to use these tech-
niques/activities in their classroom, and 85 per cent said yes. Those answering yes
were requested to list up to three of the most important factors. The reasons given
by more than 10 per cent of teachers are summarized in Table 7.1.
The table shows the answers to some questions about local contexts that the
baseline study failed to ask, and which it would have been useful for those offering
the UK training to know. If this information had been available it might have
been possible to make a stronger case for not linking the training to an accredited
qualification, instead using more of the available time to discuss and practise ways
of implementing important TEYL principles in typical classroom contexts. Such a
focus would in turn have been reflected in the structure and content of the teacher
Table 7.1 Teachers’ perceptions of factors making it difficult to use techniques/

activities introduced during training in primary classrooms.
Factors making it difficult to implement training Number/percentage of

techniques/activities respondents
(100% = 511)
1. Class size; large numbers, the difficulty of 245
managing large numbers, physical space. 47.9%
2. The small number of lessons per week and the 181
pressure to ‘finish the book’ to meet the demands of 35.4%
the test, both making it difficult to find the time
needed to use suggested techniques/activities.
3. Incompatibility of testing content/format with 92
the use of techniques/activities and the critical role 18%
of test results in leaders’ judgements of students’ and
teachers’ performance.
4. Learners’ language level and inability to 84
understand meanings and instructions, and their 16.4%
cultural reluctance to participate.
5. Inappropriacy of textbooks, and so shortage of 77
materials to support the use of suggested activities. 15.1%
6. Teachers’ excessive workloads, and so their lack of 74
time to plan classes and materials that incorporate 14.5%
these techniques/activities.
7. A general lack of understanding of/interest in the 58
purpose or process of language learning in the school 11.3%
and immediate outside environment.
Source: Adapted from Wedell 2005: 641.
training materials, and would probably also have influenced what aspects of trainer
development were emphasized. Instead the teacher training programmes, while
introducing teachers to a range of primary language teaching activities that most
of them found relevant, did not sufficiently acknowledge or take account of aspects
of the local context that might make them difficult for many teachers to use.
7.3.2 Support for learning the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of change
At first glance the trainer-training programme and the teacher-training pro-

grammes that followed did provide support for trainers and teachers to be
introduced to some of the ‘whats’ and ‘hows’ of the national change that they
would be expected to implement. However, considered more carefully, both sets of
training provided just an initial introduction to the new understandings and skills
that would be needed. Such an introduction alone was not sufficient to enable
widespread confident or competent implementation.
The only explicit expectation of the trainers was that they should work on one
teacher-training programme after their return. While a minority did work on
more than one programme, and many of them had explicit training roles in their
existing jobs, there was no structure to provide support for them to develop their
training skills further once the teacher-training programmes ended. The trainer
training they had received emphasized the need for trainers, for example, to:
begin by finding out about teachers’ previous experiences, and their existing
beliefs and behaviours, in order, wherever possible, to make links between
these and whatever new ideas/practices were to be implemented
help teachers understand new practices and be able to explain their value to
others
provide opportunities for teachers to experience and think about new ideas
and activities themselves, through trainer demonstrations, before expecting
them to apply them
provide teachers with opportunities to practise planning and managing new
techniques and activities, and chances to think about and obtain reactions to
such practise from peers and trainers (adapted from Hayes 2000)
The trainer training aimed to develop a responsive and flexible mode of training.
This was very different from the tightly structured, lecture-based training
approach most commonly used in the context. Developing competence at, and
confidence in, approaching the training process in such a flexible and responsive
manner takes time and plenty of practice. Many trainers found their one experience
of being expected to train in such a different manner extremely difficult and were
probably pleased not to have to repeat it! A significant minority, however, found it
exciting. For those trainers who wished to develop further, the lack of explicit
further opportunities to train and/or support teachers after their return (see below),
represented an under-utilization of the investment that regional planners had
made in their training.
Similarly, turning to the teachers, once again support for their further devel-
opment was lacking. A single teacher-training programme carried out away from
participants’ teaching context does not result in teachers who are immediately able
to implement the content of the training in their own classrooms. Research into
teacher learning and teacher change from around the world (Dalin 1994; Fullan
2000; Harvey 1996, 1999; Lamb 1995; Leithwood et al. 2002; Li 1998; Showers
and Joyce 1996) testifies to the need for continuing support for teachers over time,
especially where, as is often the case, and was true here, the initial training does
not fully acknowledge important aspects of the classroom realities in which most
teachers work.
If regional policy makers had been willing to carry out a more truly repre-
sentative baseline study, it would have demonstrated some of the obvious diffi-
culties that class size, limited time and lack of appropriate materials would
represent for the implementation of TEYL in many classrooms. This information
would, as said previously, have been useful for those providing trainer training and
designing teacher-training materials. It might also have reminded planners of the
need to plan for and fund mechanisms to help teachers returning from training
programmes, and their larger number of untrained colleagues, to collaborate and
support each other during the early years of introducing English into primary
classrooms.
The first case (chapter 5) showed how positively implementers in different
institutions viewed the opportunities that were provided for them to meet each
other and share problems and solutions. One way of meeting the above need might
therefore have been to plan for the establishment of some form of primary English
teachers’ group in each district, town or county represented on the teacher-training
programmes. To provide a nucleus for the formation of such groups, regional
planners could have arranged for each administrative area to send a minimum of
two or three of their teachers to one of the training courses. The two years during
which the trainer and teacher training took place could have been used to publicize
and promote the formation of such groups as teachers returned from the three-
week courses to their areas. Since funding would be necessary to set up, facilitate
and maintain such groups, policy makers could have agreed to offer like-for-like
funding to any local-level educational administrators willing to provide matching
funding, a space for meetings and time for regular meetings within school hours.
Such planning would potentially also have enabled the greater utilization of the
minority of trainers who were keen to develop their training skills. Those who
wished to might for example have been seconded for a period of time (taking
account of their personal circumstances) to act as expert ‘coaches’ (Joyce and
Showers 1988; Showers and Joyce 1996) or trainers of coaches for the local-level
teachers’ groups suggested above, as well as perhaps disseminating teacher training
more widely through further, smaller-scale, local teacher-training programmes.
7.3.3 Leadership of the change-implementation process
The previous section may suggest that there was a lack of leadership during the
planning and early years of the TEYL implementation process covered by this case
study. This would however only be partly true. While policy makers failed to
consider some aspects of the reality of the overall implementation context, within
the limited boundaries of the case, whose focus was on enabling some sort of
implementation to begin with teachers who were at least partly prepared, they
were actively involved. They managed the logistics and funding of the teacher-
training programmes, they ensured that returning trainers attended these and
enabled subsequent trainers to attend as assistants. They kept closely in touch with
the UK training institution and monitored the performance of trainers in the UK.
Finally they strongly encouraged representatives of all four groups to collaborate
on turning the training materials that they had developed into a TEYL handbook
for the region. This was duly published. Overall, therefore, compared with the
national-change leaders in both other cases discussed, the regional leadership in
this case were highly participative and involved.
7.4 What does this case tell us about the educational-change

process?
7.4.1 It may be wise for national educational changes to be

introduced in only very general terms
National policy makers’ decision to introduce English at primary level was not
accompanied by much detailed guidance as to the content or process of such new
learning. I do not know the reasons for this but it seems a wise decision. Given the
very great contextual differences across the country in terms of socio-economic
level and prior experience of the change, it would have been impossible to provide
detailed universal guidance for the stages of implementation and therefore a
general directive to start the process was probably all that could realistically be
provided. This represents a positive example of pragmatic willingness to allow
local leaders to plan implementation in a manner that is appropriate for them.
However, for such a devolved model of implementation to lead to positive
outcomes across a country, it is necessary for local leaders to be helped to thor-
oughly understand what is being asked of them and to be fairly funded. In the
case-study setting, the local leaders in a rapidly modernizing, well-developed
region were able to take appropriate initiatives without detailed guidance from
above. The region was also sufficiently economically developed to be able to fund
the trainer-training and teacher-training programmes. The situation in other parts
of the country was less favourable.
7.4.2 Change policy that ignores powerful cultural, social or material

realities will not achieve its hoped-for outcomes
The national policy documents relating to the teaching of English at primary level
explicitly stated that there should not be formal assessment of learners. It became
clear during the baseline study that this was ignored in schools that had already
begun primary English. Assessment might remain informal for the very early
primary years, but since for most ambitious parents, especially in urban areas,
primary schools were merely the stepping-stone to their child’s entry to a ‘good’
secondary school, and since such secondary schools had traditional form-focused
English entrance exams, formal assessment of a very traditional kind was common
in the last few years of primary school. The inevitable effect in many cases was to
orient English teaching during these years firmly towards the formal study of
language. This diminished the chance of achieving one of the hoped-for outcomes
of a longer period of language study, the development of a positive attitude to, and
enjoyment of, using English among learners. Policy makers cannot have been
unaware that this would be so.
Similarly, regional policy makers in the case-study setting cannot have been
unaware of the material and cultural reality that would influence what teachers
perceive as possible in the classroom. As shown above, ignoring these influenced

the impact of both the trainer-training and the teacher-training provision.
This suggests that policy makers, when planning for implementation:
will almost certainly fail to obtain the most effective return on their
investment of time and resources if their plans do not consider at least the
most typically occurring contextual factors that may influence the success of
what it is hoped to achieve
are likely to lessen the chance of implementers viewing the proposed change
positively if it becomes evident that their plans for supporting the
implementation process do not in fact take such day to day contextual factors
into account
should be frank with whomever they delegate the provision of support
programmes to, so that they are aware of all important contextual factors and
can design and teach such programmes bearing these in mind
7.4.3 A single ‘change’ training course, away from the working

context, is almost certainly insufficient to enable a complex change to
be implemented as hoped
As repeatedly mentioned, and as I hope the previous case illustrated, complex

change is just that. For individuals (teachers, trainers or administrators) to become
able to develop understanding of, and confidence in, their ability to practise what
it actually entails in their own classrooms or offices, a long time is required
(remember that the teachers in chapter 6 had two years of full-time training!).
Policy makers at all levels therefore need to:
consider whether large-scale training away from the classroom in which the
training will be implemented is the most useful way of supporting
implementation
recognize that if they choose this means of introducing the change to
teachers, they will need to develop systems to provide ongoing support for
teachers working in their own classrooms after the initial training course is
over
7.4.4 Trained teachers are only part of any successful educational

change process
As in the previous cases, it is clear here that while choosing to start a change
planning process by trying to ensure that most teachers have at least an outline
understanding of what is expected of them may make sense, this is just one aspect
of the whole change context. Other aspects cannot be ignored.
Conclusion to section 2
The three case studies that I have reported here all represent elements of larger
educational-change processes that have not yet been fully completed. They span
twenty years. The first trainees were recruited to case-two training in the late
1980s and the last in the late 1990s. Case one ran throughout most of the 1990s
and case three began in the early noughties and continues to the present. In this
final part of the chapter, I briefly summarize some of the themes that I feel all cases
share.
1 The approach to the planning of change
In all the cases, the change planning is undeniably top down and implicitly, at
least, power coercive in Chin and Benne’s terms. National-level policy makers
reach their decisions without wide consultation, especially with those who will be
expected to carry out the actual implementation. They make little effort to
communicate the rationale for change and the main benefits that it is expected to
bring about and provide only very sketchy guidance as to what the change out-
comes ought to look like, or how those to whom they have delegated responsibility
for implementation should begin to think about the process. There seems to be an
assumption that the top needs only to ‘require’ that regional, local or institutional
leaders act, and they will know what to do. As is hopefully clear, they often do not
know. Such an approach does not lead to success.
2 Policy makers’ unawareness of context
Perhaps because of their top-down organizational culture, policy makers at all

levels in all the above cases seemed to underestimate the criticality of at least
considering contextual reality in their planning. Relevant aspects of such reality
include:
the material context of their existing education systems, for example the class
sizes or the facilities available
the socio-economic context, for example teachers’ salaries and status within
society
the geographical context, for example the economic and social disparities
that exist between different parts of the country
the human context, for example the assumptions prevailing among
educators, administrators, learners and parents in the existing educational
and organizational cultures
3 Educational change as complex change involving a degree of

‘reculturing’
Education systems all around the world are deeply traditional and many seem only
now to be beginning to seriously contemplate the content and process of education
as involving more than the transmission of a body of mostly fact-based knowledge
from one generation to the next. There is of course a growing body of educational
rhetoric visible in policy documents worldwide that use terms like learner-centred
classrooms, learner autonomy, interaction, enquiry-based learning or developing learners’
problem-solving skills. However, assumptions about appropriate teaching roles and
behaviours visible among participants at all levels in the cases suggest that a
basically transmission-based view of education remains very influential.
If this is so then any educational change that hopes to lead to genuinely dif-
ferent learner outcomes is likely to involve complex changes to existing educa-
tional and organizational cultures. Achieving successful implementation will
require many people’s commitment over time. Sustained commitment requires
appropriate support. Top-down, power-coercive approaches are unlikely to be able
to provide such support. If there is ever to be widespread successful imple-
mentation of complex educational change, policy makers need to reassess the
manner in which they approach the planning and managing of such change.
4 Policy makers are inconsistent
In each of the cases there was evidence of inconsistency between what changed and
what did not. For example, while curricula or teaching approach officially changed,
approaches to teacher education, the content of teaching materials and, most
influentially, the content and format of high-stakes tests did not. Again there may
be a number for reasons for this, from lack of awareness of the mutual manner in
which different aspects of any subject area influence each other, to lack of funding
to renew the textbooks, to the political difficulties that are inherent in changing
something as sensitive as a university entrance exam. Nonetheless, such incon-
sistency makes change implementation difficult, if not impossible, in the short
term.
5 Educational change is often a response to other changes in the

national or international environment
The cases all show evidence of educational change policy being affected by actual
or perceived changes in either the national or international environments. In an
increasingly interdependent world, in which countries compete for shares of an
ever more global market, and so become increasingly aware of the need to have a
skilled work force, such trends are likely to continue.
6 Educational changes focus almost exclusively on the teacher
It is not surprising that teachers are seen to be central to the implementation of

any educational change. They are. However, as all the cases showed, in order for
teachers to feel that the implementation efforts they are asked to make are
worthwhile over the years that developing new mastery can take, they need to feel
that the wider educational environment, and those outside whom it influences, are
all broadly supportive of the change and understand what the teachers are trying to
do. For this to be so, educational-change planners need to become far more aware
of all the others who require ‘change education’; not only teachers, but also those
who affect their view of themselves and of the work they do.
The importance of some sort of ‘baseline study’ to provide a real sense of the
context into which the change is to be introduced, prior to beginning detailed
planning of change implementation in a local area, has been referred to in this
chapter. The lack of such information also contributed to the problems that were
encountered in the other cases discussed. Carrying out a formal, systematic, study
nationwide is a complex, time-consuming, and so expensive, business. Hence it
rarely happens. However at local level I believe strongly that even if carried out
only quickly and cheaply such studies can provide information that can positively
inform the implementation planning process. The final section of the book
therefore proposes a small number of key questions that might guide such studies.
I then ask and answer these questions in three different educational-change sce-
narios to demonstrate what the information that the answers provide implies for
the sequence and timing of the change-planning and change-implementation
processes.
References
Works cited
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language teaching’, English Language Teaching Journal, 49/1, 37–43.
Dalin, P. (1994), How Schools Improve. London: IMTEC.
Fullan, M.G. (1991), ‘Planning, doing and coping with change’ in A. Harris, N.
Bennett and M. Preedy (eds), Organisational Effectiveness and Improvement in Edu-
cation, 205-218. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Fullan, M.G. (2000), ‘The return of large-scale reform’, Journal of Educational Change,
1, 5–28.
Harvey, S.P. (1996), ‘Primary science’, inset in ‘South Africa: an evaluation of class-
room support’, unpublished PhD thesis. University of Exeter.
Harvey, S.P. (1999), ‘The impact of coaching in South African primary science’, inset
in International Journal of Educational Development, 19/3, 191-205.
Hayes, D. (2000), ‘Cascade training and teachers’ professional development’, English
Language Teaching Journal, 54/2, 135–45.
Horvath, A. (1990), ‘Tradition and modernism: Educational consequences of changes
in Hungarian society’, International Review of Education, 36/2, 207–17.
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49/1, 72–79.
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scale reform’, Journal of Educational Change, 3, 7–33.
Li, Defeng (1998), ‘It’s always more difficult than you plan and imagine: teachers’
perceived difficulties in introducing the communicative approach in South Korea’,
in D.R. Hall and A. Hewings (eds), Innovation in English Language Teaching,
149–66. London: Routledge.
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Continuum.
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Oxford: Heinemann.
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China’, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 31/4, 397–425.
Showers, B. and Joyce, B. (1996), ‘The evolution of peer coaching’, Educational Lea-
dership, 53, 12–16.
Wedell, M. (2000), ‘Managing educational change in a turbulent environment: the ELTSUP
project in Hungary 1991-1998’, unpublished PhD thesis. University of Glamorgan.
Wedell, M. (2005), ‘Cascading training down into the classroom: The need for parallel
planning’, International Journal of Educational Development, 25/6, 637–651.
Further Reading
There are a large number of books and articles dealing with the experiences of
those involved in educational-change initiatives relating to the teaching of English
in different countries. Most such initiatives have been related to curriculum
change, and the move from a broadly transmission-based approach to the teaching
of language to a more ‘communicative’ approach, such as the one referred to in
chapters 5 and 6 in this section. These change initiatives have therefore been
complex, since they have involved a considerable degree of reculturing. Few, if
any, have been unambiguously successful, for reasons similar to those discussed in
the case studies.
Books
Holliday, A. (1994), Appropriate Methodology and Social Context. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
This was one of the first books to explicitly recognize the need to consider cultural
contexts when introducing educational change. Its focus is on an educational-
change programme in Egypt.
Coleman, H. (ed.) (1996), Society and the Language Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
This edited edition contains examples of responses to culturally different teaching

approaches from China, Japan, Pakistan and Indonesia, together with a very clear
table demonstrating how different views of education impact on expected teacher

and learner roles and on what happens in classrooms.
Kennedy, C., Doyle, P. and Goh, C. (eds) (1999), Exploring Change in English Language
Teaching. Oxford: Macmillan/Heinemann.
This discusses attempts to implement national-change initiatives in Malaysia and

Hong Kong.
Hall, D.R. and Hewings, A. (eds) (2001), Innovation in English Language Teaching.
London: Routledge.
This introduces the idea of the need for cultural continuity in any educational-
change initiative and also examples of change initiatives from South Korea and
Pakistan.
Articles
The first group of articles discuss approaches to, or frameworks for, the leadership/
management of educational change, and/or discuss factors in the wider context,
which may influence the route or rate of educational change implementation.
Dushku, S. (1998), ‘ELT in Albania: project evaluation and change’, System, 26/3,
369–88.
Huh, K.C. (2001), ‘Is finding the right balance with regard to change possible, given
the tensions that occur between global influences and local traditions in countries
in Asia-Pacific?’, Journal of Educational Change, 2, 257–60.
Kennedy, C. (1988), ‘Evaluating the management of change’, Applied Linguistics, 9/4,
329–42.
Luxon, T. (1994), ‘The psychological risk for teachers at a time of methodological
change’, Teacher Trainer, 8/1, 6–9.
Nunan, D. (2003), ‘The impact of English as a global language on educational policies
and practices in the Asia-Pacific region’, TESOL Quarterly, 37/4, 589–613.
Tudor, I. (2003), ‘Learning to live with complexity: towards an ecological perspective
on language teaching’, System, 31/1, 1–12.
Waters, A. and Vilches, M. (2001), ‘Implementing ELT innovations: a needs analysis
framework’, English Language Teaching Journal, 55/2, 133–141.
Wedell, M. (2003), ‘Giving TESOL change a chance: supporting key players in the
curriculum change process’, System, 31/4, 439–56.
The second group are more like case studies and report on aspects of (usually)
teachers’ experience of participating in English-language-teaching-related change
initiatives around the world.
Al Hamzi, S. (2003), ‘EFL teacher preparation programmes in Saudi Arabia: trends

and challenges’, TESOL Quarterly, 37/2, 341–45.
Berry, R.S.Y. (2003), ‘English language teaching and learning in mainland China: a
comparison of the intentions of the English language curriculum reform and the
real life teaching and learning situation in the English classroom’, Hong Kong
Institute of Education NAS Newsletter, 4, 3–6.
Butler, Y.G. (2004), ‘What level of English proficiency do elementary school teachers
need to attain to teach EFL? Case studies from Korea, Taiwan and Japan’, TESOL
Quarterly, 38/2, 245–78.
Chacon, C.T. (2005), ‘Teachers perceived efficacy among English as a foreign language
teachers in middle schools in Venezuela’, Teaching and Teacher Education, 21, 257–
72.
Hyde, B. (1994), ‘Albanian babies and bathwater’, Teacher Trainer, 8/1, 10–13.
Hu, G.W. (2002), ‘Recent important developments in secondary English language
teaching in the P.R. China’, Language Culture and Curriculum, 15/1, 30–49.
Orafi, S. (2008), ‘Investigating teachers’ practices and beliefs in relation to curriculum
innovation in ELT in Libya’, unpublished PhD thesis. University of Leeds.
Prophet, R. (1995), ‘View from the Botswana Junior Secondary classroom: case study
of a curriculum intervention’, International Journal of Educational Development, 15/2,
127–40.
Waters, A. (with Ma. Luz C. Vilches) (2008), ‘Factors affecting ELT reforms: the case
of the Philippines basic education curriculum’, RELC Journal, 39/1, 5–24.
Wu, X.D. and Fang, L. (2002), ‘Teaching communicative English in China: a case
study of the gap between teachers’ views and practice’, Asian Journal of ELT, 12,
143–162.
Section 3:
Planning to Implement Educational Change:

Introduction
I imagine that by now you will not need convincing about how complicated the
process of planning to implement almost any educational change is likely to be.
You will also, I hope, recognize that even when apparently implemented suc-
cessfully, a change can take many years to reach a point where it becomes just
another part of normal classroom life. For example, one complex change in edu-
cation systems worldwide during the last 10–15 years that most of you will have
encountered in some form is the introduction of information and communications
technology (ICT) into education systems worldwide at all levels. The rationale for
the massive financial investment that this represents has been the assumption that
the use of technology will enable changes to teaching and learning practices in
school classrooms, which will in turn enable learners to benefit from a far more
flexible, interactive, challenging and personalized learning experience. Such
hoped-for changes in teaching and learning behaviour of course presuppose a
greater or lesser degree of reculturing for all those directly affected. Ten or more
years later in many contexts, although the use of technology may have become a
regular part of school life, the manner in which it is used often remains quite
superficial (teachers’ notes on PowerPoint for example), and the actual visible
teaching and learning practices in many classrooms remain much as they were
before its introduction. I believe that it will take a further ten years or more (and
ever more sophisticated technology) to reach a point where reculturing has
occurred to the extent that the majority of those working with ICT in classrooms
understand how it can be used to achieve the ‘real’ hoped-for changes that will
justify its introduction.
Over such long time spans, the environment in which any education system is
situated is unlikely to stand still. One common environmental change that fre-
quently affects politically inspired educational-change processes is that the
national policy makers with whom the educational change originated are replaced
by others, who, for political and/or economic reasons, decide not to retain their
predecessors’ policies. At worst this can mean abrupt abandonment of (financial
and leadership) support for a change initiative and/or the decision to implement it
very differently. Such policy shifts seem to occur more often than common sense
suggests they should. When they do, of course the human and financial investment
that has already been made probably over a number of years is implicitly devalued,
and (as in the case in chapter 5) the people affected, especially teachers, may
become reluctant to invest their energy in any future changes.
People’s experiences affect their behaviour. If policy makers and local leaders
wish to introduce changes that will require new behaviours, then their planning
needs to try to ensure that people’s experiences of change are as positive as possible.
For that to be likely, any change needs to be planned bearing people’s existing
realities in mind. To identify such realities some kind of more or less formal
information-gathering exercise (‘baseline study’) is necessary. Perhaps because
carrying out a detailed study at national level would, in most countries, be very
complex (and so time consuming and expensive) or perhaps because few govern-
ments like to draw explicit attention to the wide variations that exist within their
national education system, baseline studies carried out at national level before a
change is decided on are rare. Consequently, local educational administrators and
institutional change leaders in a wide range of different local contexts may be
confronted with the ‘requirement’ to implement a national change, without the
change (or the expected outcomes of the change) having been ‘modified’ in any way
to suit their circumstances. This last section of the book proposes a means of
carrying out a simple ‘baseline study’ at the local/institutional level and shows how
the information gathered can be used to inform local implementation planning.
The suggested process centres on two groups of questions, which I believe
(Wedell 2003) it is relevant to ask in any educational-change situation. The first
group contains questions that aim to identify the current beliefs and skills of all
those who will be most directly affected by the proposed change (‘People in
contexts’ in Figure 4.1 on page 48), what degree of reculturing the change
represents, and so what support mechanisms will need to be established if the
change is to become visible in classrooms.
Societal beliefs about teaching and learning, and hence what is expected of
teachers and learners in classrooms, is one influence on how any subject is taught.
Another set of influences, which of course overlap to some extent, are the condi-
tions in which the teaching takes place, for example class sizes and available
resources, the number of timetable hours available and how the subject is assessed.
This second group of questions therefore considers the degree of ‘fit’ between the
existing conditions (‘Conditions in contexts’ in Figure 4.1) and the conditions that
would best support implementation of the proposed changes.
In this section I will use three scenarios as illustrations. They all represent
examples of types of educational-change processes that I have personal experience
of, and so again relate to language education. However, I believe that the question
and answer process I suggest is relevant for educational change in any discipline
and of any scale. The scenarios are:
planning for the implementation of ICT-assisted language learning to

support the development of oral/aural skills
Introduction 125
planning for the local implementation of a new national language curriculum

whose hoped-for outcomes entail a significant degree of ‘reculturing’
planning the content and process of a new initial language-teacher-education
curriculum
For each, I identify a number of questions, under the two main headings above,
that I believe that planners in the setting could usefully ask to get a sense of their
context before making final planning decisions. I also give one or more possible
answers and then discuss what the answer(s) imply for the planning
/implementation process. I fully acknowledge that the answers are only examples
based on my own experience, and that they will be more or less different in
different contexts. However, my purpose for working through the scenarios is to
demonstrate how, if change leaders try to obtain answers that are as honest as
possible, the information gathered can help guide their decision making in terms
of:
identifying whether/how the proposed change will need to be adjusted to

enable implementation to begin in the existing context
clarifying what support they will need to provide for those who are most
affected, before they can expect any classroom implementation to take place
identifying which groups may continue to need support once
implementation has begun, what form such support might take and so how
the implementation process should be staged
sequencing the stages of their planning so that they support and build on
each other
Such ‘informed’ planning should make it more likely that the process is experi-
enced positively by those most directly affected. If this is so, it stands more chance
of achieving at least some of the hoped-for (positive) educational outcomes.
For each scenario I provide a brief contextual background and explain the
desired outcome of the change proposed. I then consider what questions it would
be sensible for local/institutional leaders to ask when they are considering how to
implement the change. Finally I offer answers to the questions based on my own
experience and, bearing the background in mind, discuss what the information
that the answers provide suggests for the planning and/or implementation
processes.
Chapter 8
Introducing ICT to support language teaching

in one institution
8.1 Background
Institutional leaders at a college with a top-down organizational culture in a

country with a broadly transmission-based educational culture are concerned by
the poor level of graduates’ oral/aural English proficiency after their four years of
college study. They decide (without consulting teaching staff) to introduce ICT-
assisted learning for three hours a week for each class to try to support the
development of students’ oral/aural language skills. There are few budgetary
constraints. They decide to convert a number of classrooms into computer
laboratories, each equipped with a terminal for each member of a single class, and
to install examples of up-to-date interactive language-teaching software on each
machine. They hope that teachers will use the time in these computer rooms to
provide students with regular exposure to a range of different varieties of spoken
English and opportunities to practise speaking themselves through one-to-one
interaction with the advanced ‘chat bot’ software that has been installed. The
hoped-for outcome is that future learners will graduate with at least basic oral/
aural confidence and proficiency. In this scenario there is no practical reason why
the leaders should not ask those affected questions directly, although the nature of
the organization makes it unlikely to happen. What questions would it then be
useful to ask to support implementation planning?
8.2 Questions
I mentioned above that I think there are two sets of questions that planners at any
level can and should ask when planning any educational change for which they are
responsible. The first set of questions revolves around identifying the current
understandings, skills, beliefs and behaviours of those who will be most directly
affected by the proposed change.
Introducing ICT to support language teaching in one institution 127
In the scenario outlined above:
Who might these people be?
What questions would you want to ask (about) them?
The second set relates to the extent to which existing conditions in which English is
taught in the institution (in this case the conditions relating to language teaching,
learning and assessment) ‘fit’ the change and the outcomes it hopes to achieve.
Which conditions might be relevant here?
What questions would you want to ask about them?
8.2.1 Questions about who will be affected
In the above scenario, I think that those most likely to be affected are:
the teachers
the learners
the computer technicians
Some questions it would be useful to ask directly of (or indirectly about) each are
given in Table 8.1.
Table 8.1 Questions that might be asked of (about) the people most affected by
the change.
Who will be What questions might it be important to ask?
affected
Teachers * What teaching methods/approaches do English teachers currently use for
developing oral/aural proficiency?
* How computer literate are most teachers?
* What do answers to these questions suggest about teachers’ likely
attitude to the proposed change the type and amount of support they will
need in order to become able to use the new facilities effectively?
Learners * What is their attitude to learning English? Are they likely to welcome
the opportunity to develop oral/aural skills more fully?
* Are there any cultural issues that might make them uncomfortable about
practising in computer labs?
* What level of computer literacy do they already have?
* What do answers to these questions suggest about the type and amount
of support they will need to become able to use the facilities effectively?
Computer * Do existing technicians have the skills necessary to maintain and provide
technicians technical support for the new computer labs?
* Is the number of existing technicians sufficient to be able to support the
use of the new computer labs/machines?
* What do answers to these questions suggest about the need for training
or new recruitment?
8.2.2 Questions about conditions influencing how language teaching

takes place
Components that I feel are likely to be relevant are:
the language-teaching curriculum/syllabus, and the teaching and learning

principles on which it is based
the most frequently used learning materials – the textbook
the format and content of internal and, especially, any external assessments
Again some questions that I feel it would be useful to ask are given below.
Table 8.2 Questions about the conditions that influence how language teaching
takes place in the college.
Component Questions it is important to ask

Curriculum * What teaching method/approach is the existing curriculum based
on?
* How does it view the learning process?
* Does it match the teaching–learning approach on which the
computer-based learning materials are based?
If it does not:
* What are the main differences?
* What support will need to be provided for whom in order to
bridge them?
Materials * What types of oral/aural activity do existing materials offer?
* Are they broadly consistent with those offered by the new
computer materials?
If not:
* How will the new software materials need to be introduced?
* What aspects of working with them might learners find difficult?
* What will teachers need to know and be able to do to make a
smooth transition?
Assessment * What aspects of language are currently most frequently assessed
and how are they assessed?
If oral/aural skills are already assessed:
* Will it be necessary to make any changes to the way in which they
are assessed?
If oral/aural skills are not assessed at present:
* Are there plans to begin to test these?
* What weighting will they have in the overall ‘mark’?
8.3 Answering the questions
Answers to the above questions, especially if they are obtained through direct
discussion with representatives of the people involved, can provide institutional
leaders with valuable information to guide their implementation planning. Some
examples of what I mean can be found in Tables 8.3 and 8.4.
Table 8.3 Answers to questions about people.
Questions Answers
What teaching methods/approaches do English * They follow a transmission-based curriculum
teachers currently use for developing oral/aural that emphazises the teaching of language
proficiency? knowledge and the development of reading
skills. They do no oral/aural practice at all.
How computer literate are most teachers? * Most teachers use computers at home for
email and the internet. None have experience
of using computers in their teaching.
What do the answers to these questions suggest * Teachers are likely to find the proposed
about:how challenging the change will be for change very challenging.
teachers? * They will need training in: principles of
the type and amount of support they will need learning and techniques/activities for
in order to become able to use the new facilities teaching oral/aural skills technical and
effectively? classroom-management skills to enable them
to use computers for supporting the learning
of such skills
What attitude do most learners have to learning * Most learners see knowledge of English as a
English? Are they likely to welcome the means of accessing information, films and
opportunity to develop oral/aural skills more music and as a gateway to possible overseas
fully? study. They are keen to develop oral/aural
skills.
Are there any cultural issues that might make * Because oral/aural skills are poor they become
them uncomfortable about practising in easily embarrassed in front of peers.
computer labs? Computer-based interaction will enable them
to begin to practise in a potentially less
stressful environment.
What level of computer literacy do they already * They are very used to using computers to
have? play games, watch films, listen to music, surf
the Web and participate in online networks
(in L1).
What do the answers to these questions suggest * They will need little technical assistance.
about the type and amount of support they will Teachers will need to be able to explain the
need to become able to use the facilities purpose of learning activities clearly, and be
effectively? available to help individuals as necessary.
Do existing technicians have the skills necessary Existing technicians do have the necessary skills.
to maintain and provide technical support for
the new computer labs? At least one more technician will need to be
Is the number of existing technicians sufficient recruited to ensure that support is available at
to be able to support the use of the new all times. S/he will need to be able to
computer labs/machines? demonstrate familiarity with the purchased
What do answers to these questions suggest hardware and software.
about the need for training or new recruitment?
The answers in Table 8.3 begin to suggest some of the preparations it will be
necessary to make. Those in Table 8.4 provide more useful information.
Table 8.4 Answers to questions about conditions.
Questions Answers
What teaching method/approach is the existing * The existing curriculum is fact based and
curriculum based on? encourages an idea of teaching as
transmission of facts. Teachers lecture and
write notes about the language on the board.
How does it view the learning process? * It views learning as memorization of
information.
Does it match the teaching–learning approach * No. The computer-based materials emphasize
on which the computer-based learning materials practice in the use of language for interaction
are based? in real time.
If it does not:
What are the main differences? * Moving from a view of language as a set of
facts to language as a means of interaction to
express/comprehend meanings.
What support will need to be provided for * Teachers will need training as above.
whom in order to bridge them?
What types of oral/aural activity do the * Linguistically controlled oral drills and very
materials offer? simple scripted role-plays for listening.
Teachers do not use them.
Are they broadly consistent with those offered * No, they offer no chances for hearing/trying
by the new computer materials? to produce unscripted language in real time.
If not:
How will the new materials need to be * Through a discussion of the nature of spoken
introduced? language.
What aspects of working with them might * The speed and unpredictability of the
learners find difficult? language, and the acceptance that it is normal
to make mistakes when speaking a second
language.
What will teachers need to know about and be * They will need to understand and be able to
able to do to make a smooth transition? explain the differences between written and
spoken language and to provide a rationale
for classroom tasks and processes.
How to manage oral/aural activities.
What aspects of language are currently most * Grammar, vocabulary and reading
frequently tested and how are they tested? comprehension. Tested using multiple-choice
If oral/aural skills are not included: questions.
Are there plans to begin to test these? * No.
What weighting will they have in the overall
‘mark’?
8.4 Establishing what preparations need to be made to

support implementation of the change
Tables 8.3 and 8.4 provide institutional planners with an outline of some of the
most important preparations that will need to be made if the people who will be
affected by the introduction of computer-based language learning are to under-
stand why and how to use it to achieve the hoped-for outcomes.
Teachers will need training in:
principles of learning and techniques/activities for teaching oral/aural

skillsthe use of the new hardware/software for supporting the learning of such
skillsclassroom management. They will need to be reminded of differences
between written and spoken language and what these imply for their
classroom role and response to learner error. They will need to be able to
explain the purpose of activities clearly, give clear instructions and
understand how it is appropriate to help individuals when necessary.
This will represent a challenge since their previous experience is of teaching based
around the accurate transmission of ‘correct facts’. They will need to understand
how working with learners who are using the computers is different, and to be able
to explain this to their learners. They will probably also need to be able to provide
a rationale for the difference that will continue to exist between classes using the
existing materials, and those using the computer-based materials.
Learners:
are positively disposed towards the idea of developing their oral/aural skills
and most already are quite familiar with the use of computers
are used to their teachers taking full responsibility for all learning in the
classroom. Their experience is principally of language learning as
memorization. They are used to being judged on the accuracy of any answers
they give
will therefore need explicit explanation of how the computer-based classes
will be different from their existing classes: what they will be expected to do;
what the purpose of doing it is; what to do if they do not understand; what to
do if they make mistakes
Technicians:
Existing technicians will need to familiarize themselves with the new hard-
and software.
Another appropriately experienced/qualified technician will need to be
employed.
Technicians will need time to consider what basic technical information and
skills teachers will need in order to be able to manage classes effectively, and
how best to enable them to acquire these.
8.4.1 Curriculum and materials
There are no plans to change these. Learners will continue to spend the bulk of
their language-learning time in the learning environment that they are familiar
with. It will be necessary for teachers to be able to explain what each type of
learning is trying to achieve. In the medium term it may be necessary to reconsider
the mismatch between the two different learning environments.
8.4.2 Assessment of oral/aural ability
This is currently not assessed in any way and the original plans for change did not
include any intention to develop assessment in this area. Institutional leaders need
to consider the implications of not assessing such performance.
What effect may it have on the seriousness with which teachers and learners
take the computer-based learning?
What effect may a lack of seriousness have on the likelihood of achieving the
hoped-for outcomes of the change?
8.5 Deciding on an order in which to make the preparations
If you were responsible for making the above preparations, what would your
priorities be? In what order would you plan what needed to be done?
Those most centrally affected and most likely to be challenged by the proposed
change are the teachers. I would therefore begin by considering how to provide the
training they need to be able to begin implementation. I have seen that they need
training in both professional and technical skills; so training will need to include:
1. discussion of how written and spoken language differ

2. discussion of the learning conditions that are likely to support the
development of oral/aural skills
3. discussion of how to explain the respective language-learning purposes of
the very different computer- and existing materials-based classes
4. discussion of/practice in how to explain (1)–(3) to the learners
5. information about, and practice in, the technical aspects of running a class
in the computer labs
6. an introduction to, and opportunities to become familiar with, the
techniques and activities that the software uses to provide practice in the
development of such skills
7. discussion of/practice in new classroom-management skills and the giving
of clear instructions for new types of learner activity
8. discussion of/practice in new aspects of their role as teachers when

supporting students in the use of the software. Important here will be the
development of noticing skills, to be able to judge when and how to
intervene.
As is obvious, most aspects of such training involve more than merely commu-
nicating factual information. They also involve adjusting their teacherly roles and
developing new skills. As seen in chapter 7.2 in the previous section, such learning
cannot be accomplished in a matter of hours or days. Teachers are likely to need a
series of training sessions over several months, interspersed between experiences of
‘trying out’ classroom implementation. Designing training provision in this way
would mean that when teachers encountered implementation problems they would
know that there will be an opportunity to share these and seek advice from
someone more ‘expert’ at the next training session. This hopefully makes it less
likely that they will feel discouraged and demotivated by the inevitable early
difficulties.
A first stage of planning for implementation might therefore be to:
agree the content and time needed for teachers’ technical training with the
technicians
identify an appropriate professional trainer and discuss the length and design
of the training provision. Issues to be discussed here include what aspects of
the training it will be essential to provide before implementation begins,
how many further cycles of training will be needed during the early
implementation stages and at what stage the purely technical training should
be provided.
book appropriate training provision for agreed dates
consider what systems might be established to encourage teachers to help
each other during initial implementation stages in between the more formal
training
decide on any timetable adjustments needed during the early
implementation stages to accommodate the above training and to provide
time for teachers to meet to share problems and solutions
A second stage that would need to happen more or less simultaneously with the
above would be to:
recruit an appropriately experienced technician

provide time for all technicians to familiarize themselves with the new
hardware/software and to prepare a technical training programme for the
teachers
A third stage, again probably needing to happen more or less in parallel with (or
very shortly after) the others, would be:
to consider the importance of giving ‘weight’ to the work done in computer-

based classes by formally assessing it in some way
If a decision is made to do so, further training in developing performance-based

assessment will be necessary for at least some teachers.
8.6 Conclusion
I am sure that you can probably think of other questions it would be appropriate
to ask, and of course in your context there would be different answers to at least
some of the questions. What I have tried to do here is show that, by using two sets
of simple questions that can be asked of any change context, it is possible to obtain
information that can guide the implementation-planning process in important
ways. It will not mean that implementation will be problem free, but it does mean
that some of the main problems that might arise will have already been thought
about – and hopefully planned for. This should make them easier to cope with, and
so mean they have fewer negative effects on implementers.
In this chapter I have looked at a single change in a single institution. In the
next I try to apply the same sets of questions to local implementation of a national
change.
Chapter 9
Introducing a new national curriculum
9.1 Background
Over the past decades, one frequent example of educational change worldwide has
been the move by more and more national governments to make proficiency in
English a central pillar of their education strategy (Graddol 2006). An example of
this trend can be seen in Japan. Here the 2002 plan to cultivate ‘Japanese with
English Abilities’ states:
With the progress of globalization in the economy and in society, it is
essential that our children acquire communication skills in English, which
has become a common international language, in order for living in the 21st
century. This has become an extremely important issue both in terms of the
future of our children and the further development of Japan as a nation.
(Ministry of Education, Tokyo, 12 July 2002)
Broadly similar rationales, based around the need to try to enable children to acquire
communication skills in English in order to maintain national competitiveness in an
ever more global market, have led educational policy makers in many countries to
decide on some or all of the following:
to change the content and weighting of state-school curricula to emphasize

the development of communication skills
to introduce English as a core subject earlier in the curriculum
to make success in national high-stakes English examinations an essential
determinant of ultimate educational and/or occupational achievement
The background to the change in this chapter is a decision by policy makers in a

centralized education system to introduce a new national English curriculum to
the state-secondary-education system. The stated purpose of doing so is to enable
the majority of learners to leave school with at least a basic level of oral and written
communication skills in English. It is hoped that, in an international context in
which English is currently the dominant language, this change will benefit both
citizens and the nation. A set of new national textbooks, specifically designed to
help teachers and learners achieve the hoped-for outcomes of the change, have been
developed. It has been planned that copies of these will be available in all schools
by the time implementation begins.
The assumptions commonly held about the purposes and processes of education,
and the way in which the education system and the institutions within it should
be organized, remain towards the left ends of the continua presented in Figures 3.1
and 3.2. The content and sequence of the new curriculum has borrowed exten-
sively from similar curricula elsewhere in the world. Its emphasis on the devel-
opment of learners’ language skills represents a shift from a long-standing
tendency to view learning English as just another school subject whose content is a
well-defined set of knowledge about English grammar, vocabulary, spelling, etc.
that needs to be memorized. For this shift in focus to become visible in most
classrooms, some existing assumptions about teaching and learning will have to
change greatly.
National policy makers decided on the change without direct consultation with
representatives of those whom it would affect. However, prior to implementation
of the curriculum, educational administrators at all levels were required to attend
regional briefings designed to explain the reasons for the change and its hoped-for
outcomes as outlined above, and to provide information about the funding
available for its implementation. They are responsible for planning, managing and
monitoring implementation in their own areas.
In what follows I am assuming (and this may often be an inaccurate assumption)
that as a result of the above briefings, local educational leaders begin their
implementation planning with at least a broad understanding of why the change
matters, what it hopes to achieve, how it hopes to achieve it and how much time
and money they have to begin the implementation process in their area. Of course,
as previously mentioned, the exact route and rate of the implementation process
will vary from one area (and probably from one school) to another. Local leaders
therefore need to develop an implementation plan that will be suitable for the
schools in their area. To help inform this process I again see the two sets of
questions introduced in chapter 8 as the starting point.
9.2 Questions
The first set of questions again tries to help identify the current understandings,
skills, beliefs and behaviours of those who will be most directly affected by the
proposed change.
Who might these people be in any local educational environment?
What questions would you want to ask (about) them?
Introducing a new national curriculum 137
The next set relates to the extent to which existing classroom conditions within
local institutions (in this case conditions that affect teaching, learning and
assessment generally, and the teaching, learning and assessment of English in
particular) are appropriate for the outcomes that the change hopes to achieve.
Which of the existing conditions that influence the existing educational
(English teaching) system are likely to be relevant here?
What questions would you want to ask about them?
A range of people are likely to be more or less directly affected by, and also affect,
the successful implementation of the curriculum change. Those most likely to be
directly affected are listed below:
English teachers whose existing, and probably deeply held, professional

assumptions about what makes them a ‘good teacher’ will be challenged by
the new curriculum, and will need support to develop new skills and
understandings
teacher educators who will be responsible for helping teachers develop such
new understandings and skills
learners whose assumptions about what is expected of them may no longer
be appropriate for English classes that are trying to develop their language
skills
institutional leaders whose assumptions about what appropriate teaching and
learning behaviours are like will need to change if they are to provide the
active support that English teachers will need during the early
implementation stage
if a separate group of inspectors or supervisors responsible for evaluating
teachers’ performance exists within the system, they will need to understand
what the curriculum change implies for the concept of good teaching, and
adapt their evaluation criteria accordingly
Less directly affected may be:
teachers of other subjects, whose curricula have not been changed; these may
not understand the changes their English-teaching colleagues are being asked
to make, and/or may not view them positively
parents whose expectations of ‘proper’ education and ‘good’ teaching are
based around seeing tangible evidence of the ‘knowledge’ their children have
learned; they may be upset if such evidence is no longer fully available for all
English lessons
Some questions that I feel that local-change leaders could usefully ask about each
group of people are given in Table 9.1.
Table 9.1 Questions that might be asked of (about) the people most affected by
the change.
Who will be affected? What questions might it be important to ask?

Local teachers * What are the essential skills and understandings that the
new curriculum requires of English teachers?
* What are their current professional strengths and
weaknesses?
* What are the most important gaps between their current
strengths and what the new curriculum expects?
* What do these gaps suggest about priorities? Are there
areas in which they will definitely need support before
implementation begins? What will be needed during the
early stages of implementation?
* What do these gaps suggest about the time needed to
prepare for implementation?
Local teacher educators * Given the most important gaps identified above, do local
teacher educators have the knowledge, understanding and
skills to provide appropriate support?
Learners * What changes in classroom behaviour will be needed if
learners are to benefit from the new curriculum?
* How can learners be helped to understand these and why
they are important?
Institutional leaders * How do they view good teaching?
* What do they know about the proposed change?
* Do they understand its implications for classroom practice?
* What is their role in supporting the implementation
process?
* What information/support will help them play a positive
role?
Inspectors/supervisors (if * How do they currently evaluate teachers and teaching?
they exist) Is this consistent with the aims of the curriculum change?
* Do they need training to adjust their evaluation criteria?
Who should provide this?
Teachers of other * Since they will not be facing similar changes, how can they
subjects? be encouraged to support their English-teaching
colleagues?
Parents * How can they be helped to understand the changes in what
will be expected of their children in English classes?
The very process of identifying questions such as those above can in itself raise
local leaders’ awareness of some of the issues that they will probably have to
address in their implementation planning. The issues already mentioned become a
little clearer, and further issues are added, by the second set of questions.
9.2.2 Questions about the existing conditions that influence the

education and language-teaching systems
The wider education system, and components of the language-education system,

will also affect the planning and implementation of the change, since they will
inevitably influence the existing expectations and behaviours of all the groups of
people discussed above.
Within the education system as a whole, the following are likely to be relevant:
the existing ‘educational culture’ (see chapter 3.2) will strongly affect both
how those working in various capacities within education, and how those
affected by education in society at large, view the purpose, content and
process of education. This ‘culture’ will include assumptions about teacher
and learner behaviour, the conditions needed for effective learning to occur
and how learning can be assessed. Such assumptions develop over time in
every society as a result of complex combinations of social, political, religious
and economic influences and experiences, and are frequently extremely deeply
rooted. The more reculturing of people that a change requires in order to
meet its aims, the more complicated the implementation process will be and
the longer it is likely to take
The educational culture is likely to be reflected in:
the national assessment system: the accepted format and content of high-
stakes exams – such as (in many countries) the university-entrance test and
the degree of collaboration between national-education policy makers and
those responsible for the design and administration of such important exams
the teacher-education system: the content and process of initial teacher
education. The national system for in-service teacher development (if it
exists)
Within the language-education system, the ease with which it is possible to

implement a new curriculum will be influenced by:
whether teaching conditions in most classrooms are supportive of the kinds

of classroom roles and activities that the new curriculum hopes to introduce.
Factors likely to be relevant include:
the number of learners in most classrooms
learners’ attitude and motivation for learning English
the number of English classes each week
the time within the working week that teachers have for preparation
the degree to which teachers are used to making their own decisions about
how to approach teaching in different classes
whether teachers and learners have access to enough suitable teaching
materials
the socio-economic status of English teachers and so their likely

willingness to spend time and energy on any necessary ‘reculturing’
the specific demands of the English-assessment system for learners at
different levels
Questions that local leaders might need to ask about existing reality in most
schools in their own area are suggested in Table 9.2.
Table 9.2 Questions about the conditions that influence how language teaching
takes place in schools.
Condition Questions
Educational culture * How are teachers and learners conventionally expected to behave
in the classroom?
* How is learning thought to take place?
* How is learning normally assessed?
* What important differences exist between answers to the above
questions and the behaviours and ideas about learning and
assessment that the new curriculum hopes to introduce?
* What do these differences suggest that learners and their parents
need to understand about the changes?
* What do these differences suggest for the design and content of
support that teachers will need?
* Are there sufficient (any?) local teacher educators who understand
how to design and provide effective support for teachers?
* What do answers to the above suggest about how long local
leaders will need to actively manage the implementation process?
The national-assessment * Are the content and format of national high-stakes tests going to
system change to match the hoped-for outcomes of the new curriculum?
The teacher-training * Are there plans to change the national initial teacher-education
system curriculum for English teachers to develop the understandings
and skills that the new curriculum expects new teachers to have?
Do these have local implications?
* Is there an existing local in-service teacher-development system?
* Does its structure easily lend itself to the type of support that will
need to be provided for existing teachers?
Classroom conditions * How many learners are there in most English classrooms?
* Do most learners and their parents view learning English
positively?
* How many hours per week of English do learners have?
* Do teachers have time during working hours to prepare for their
classes?
* Are teachers used to making their own decisions about what and
how to teach?
* Will the above conditions support teachers trying to implement
the sort of teaching that the new curriculum expects?
Teaching materials * By the time implementation starts, will there be enough
appropriate teaching materials in most classrooms?
Teachers’ socio-economic * Are English teachers generally satisfied with their jobs?
status * Can they live adequately on their salaries without having to do
further private work?
* Can teachers reasonably be expected to spend the extra time that
implementation will demand, without further reward?
Assessment of English * What are the most important English exams that learners have to
take?
* When do they occur?
* What do they assess?
* Are there any ways in which the demands of assessment may affect
teachers’ and learners’ willingness to work using the new
curriculum?
How local leaders set about answering the questions will of course vary con-
siderably. Few are likely to be fully trained evaluators and researchers, and in many
contexts there will be pressure from national policy makers to move towards
implementation as rapidly as possible. In such circumstances there will be neither
the specialist skills nor the time to carry out a full baseline study in which answers
to complex questions like those above are systematically sought, and their answers
analysed and considered before plans for implementation are made. More often
answers may only be partial, based on local leaders’ experience of their local
context and (hopefully) discussion with at least some English-teacher educators,
institutional leaders and members of their staff.
The accuracy of data gathered in such an informal manner may be questioned.
Reluctance to admit that there are problems with existing provision, prior
experience of negative responses to honest appraisals from those higher up the
educational hierarchy, or genuine lack of understanding of what is being asked,
may all make people reluctant and/or unable to provide an honest assessment of
their existing realities. Local leaders can set an example in their own attitude to the
question–answer process, but ultimately carrying out the process suggested here
will only be worthwhile if the information gathered provides a more or less honest
reflection of the local reality. Where it does so, regardless of its strict ‘reliability’ in
research terms, the information gathered can help local planners to develop a
clearer picture of some of the main issues they will need to consider in their
implementation planning. I try to illustrate this in Tables 9.3 and 9.4 below.
Table 9.3 further highlights aspects of the local reality that local leaders will
need to consider in their plans. It begins to give a sense of implementation as an
ongoing process in which teachers especially, but also learners and institutional
leaders, will need support over time. Table 9.4 helps develop the picture further.
Answers in Table 9.4 explain the context into which the change is being
introduced further, and help raise awareness of some of the most significant ‘gaps’
that will need to be worked on if the hoped-for outcomes of the new curriculum
are to become visible in the local classroom reality. The next section summarizes
Table 9.3 Some answers to questions about the people who will be affected.
Questions Answers
Local teachers
What are the essential skills and * Good personal-language skills.
understandings that the new curriculum * A good understanding of the structure
requires of English teachers? of English and its vocabulary.
Understanding of ideas about how
people learn to use languages, and
knowledge about and confidence in
using classroom techniques that will
help learners develop communication
skills.
What are their current professional * Variable personal-language proficiency.

strengths and weaknesses? * Good teachers of grammar and
What are the most important gaps between vocabulary.
their current strengths and what the new * Teachers’ variable language proficiency.
curriculum expects? * Little knowledge of current ideas about
foreign-language learning and no
experience of teaching language skills.
* Limited range of classroom-
management skills.
Before implementation:
What do these gaps suggest about * Teachers’ language proficiency is a
priorities? Are there areas in which they priority if they are to feel confident
will definitely need support before enough to develop new teaching
implementation begins/what will be approaches.
needed during the early stages of * An introduction to ideas about how
implementation? language skills are learned.
* Chances to experience and try out some
basic skill-development techniques used
in the new textbooks.
During implementation:
* Ongoing language and methodological
support during the first few years of the
implementation.
* Periods of formal training will ideally
be followed by linked practice time in
school, supported by more ‘expert’
mentors.
What do these gaps suggest about the time * If teachers are to be properly prepared,
needed to prepare for implementation? implementation should not begin for at
least a year or two.
Teacher educators
Given the most important gaps identified * They can help develop teachers’
above, do local teacher educators have the language proficiency.
knowledge, understanding and skills to * Most are familiar with current ideas
provide appropriate support? about learning to use a foreign language
and the teaching approaches

recommended to try to enable such
learning to take place.
* They have little experience of using
ideas in practice, so may need training
in demonstrating teaching approaches.
* They know little about current views of
teacher learning and what these imply
for the design, content and process of
training course design.
Learners
What changes in classroom behaviour will * They will no longer find that taking
be needed if learners are to benefit from the notes of what the teacher writes on the
new curriculum? board and memorizing these is sufficient
to do well in English.
* They will be expected to participate in
skill-development activities, sometimes
with others. These will often involve
making personal choices about language
How can learners be helped to understand use, which will sometimes be ‘incorrect’.
these changes and why they are important? * Changes in expectation, and the reasons
behind them, need to be explained
simply, and probably repeatedly, by
institutional leaders and teachers,
during the first months of
implementation.
Institutional leaders
How do they view good teaching? * See educational culture below.
What do they know about the proposed * They have been officially told that the
change? new curriculum will be introduced, but
Do they understand its implications for have had no further information.
classroom practice? * No.
What is their role in supporting the * Given the support that teachers will need
implementation process? before and during the implementation
stage, they will need to be flexible in
terms of providing time and space for
more or less formal training.
What information/support will help them * Local leaders will need to brief them
play a positive role? about the rationale for the changes and
their role over time in supporting their
teachers’ implementation efforts.
Inspectors/supervisors * There are no inspectors in this context.
How do they currently evaluate teachers Teachers are evaluated within their
and teaching? schools mostly according to their
learners’ exam results.
Is this consistent with the aims of the
curriculum change?
Do they need training to adjust their
evaluation criteria?
Who should provide this?
Colleagues teaching other subjects * Institutional leaders will need to

Since they will not be facing similar provide some basic information about/
changes, how can they be encouraged to rationale for the changes and encourage
support their English-teaching colleagues? everyone to support those involved in
them.
Parents
How can they be helped to understand the * Local leaders will need to decide on
changes in what will be expected of their awareness-raising/information sharing
children in English classes? strategies to explain simply why and
how the work their children do in
English classes is to change.
the implication of some answers in Tables 9.3 and 9.4 for the local planning of
change implementation.
9.4 Establishing what preparations need to be made to

support change implementation
Successfully planning and managing implementation of a national change at a

local level, where the professional strengths and weaknesses of different institu-
tions and the personal feelings/reactions of a large number of people all potentially
influence planning outcomes, is an enormous challenge. Results of implementation
planning will depend on the degree to which such local planning is informed by a
more detailed awareness of the many interrelated contextual variables than it is
possible to introduce in this example. However, although the information in
Tables 9.3 and 9.4 is only illustrative and partial, I believe that there is great value
in thinking through what it can tell planners about the sorts of practical imple-
mentation decisions they will have to make. Here I make the big assumption that,
thanks to the national briefings they have attended and their high level of pro-
fessionalism, local planners do fully understand the important aspects of the
change, and are therefore able to use the information that they have gathered
effectively.
How might the information in Tables 9.3 and 9.4 above help inform your
planning of the following aspects of the change-implementation process?
communicating the change appropriately to those affected by it
preparing/supporting teachers to begin implementation
The central figures whose attitudes and behaviours will determine the success of
this, or any other, educational change are of course the classroom English teachers,
and I therefore begin by discussing preparation relating to these. But, as is obvious
from the tables, the manner in which, and the enthusiasm with which, teachers
Table 9.4 Some answers to questions about the conditions that influence the
general education and English-language-teaching systems.
Questions Answers
Educational culture
How are teachers and learners conventionally * Teacher–learner relationships are formal.
expected to behave in the classroom? Teachers talk and learners listen and take
notes. Learners rarely speak apart from
asking or answering questions.
How is learning thought to take place? * Largely through memorization of factual
information.
How is learning normally assessed? * Usually through exams that test accurate
recall of factual information.
What important differences exist between * Depending on the focus of each stage of the
answers to the above questions and the lesson, the curriculum assumptions include:
behaviours and ideas about learning and less rigid classroom relationships
assessment that the new curriculum hopes to greater participation by learners greater
introduce? variety of classroom activity
more English spoken in class
assessment of performance as well as
knowledge
What do these differences suggest that learners * Learners and their parents will need to be
and their parents need to understand about the helped to understand the reasons for, and
changes? value of, the changes.
What do these differences suggest for the design * Teachers will need to make great professional
and content of support that teachers will need? adjustments to their thinking and behaviour.
They will need opportunities to recognize
the above differences, to discuss how they
might be introduced in their classrooms, and
to experience them and practise them over
time.
Are there sufficient local teacher educators who * Educators share most aspects of the
understand how to design and provide effective educational culture with teachers. They will
support for teachers? probably need some training before they
begin to work with teachers.
What do answers to the above suggest about the * Several years at least. Planners need to think
length of time during which local leaders will about staging the process.
need to actively manage the implementation
process?
High-stakes assessment
Are the content and format of national high * There is no intention to change high stakes
stakes English tests going to change to match tests at this stage. They continue to reflect
the hoped-for outcomes of the new curriculum? the existing knowledge-based curriculum.
Existing teacher-education provision
Are there plans to change the national initial * Local planners are not responsible for initial
teacher-education curriculum for English teacher education.
teachers to develop the understandings and
skills that the new curriculum expects new
teachers to have? Do these have local
implications?
Is there an existing local in-service teacher- * The existing in-service training system
development system? provides short (maximum one week) formal
Does its structure easily lend itself to the type of courses outside school. These aim to provide
support that will need to be provided for teachers with new professional information
existing teachers?
through lectures and/or the viewing and

discussion of model lessons.
* The design, content, process and duration of
courses to support curriculum change will
need to be reconsidered.
Classroom conditions
How many learners are there in most English * Numbers range from 45 to 70.
classrooms?
Do most learners and their parents view learning * A minority are very positive, the remainder
English positively? are indifferent.
How many hours per week of English do * 4–6 hours per week throughout secondary
learners have? school.
Do teachers have time during working hours to * Little scheduled time is available.
prepare for their classes?
Are teachers used to making their own decisions * Most teachers are used to ‘following the
about what and how to teach? book’ closely, although they may decide to
skip parts of it.
Will the above conditions support teachers * Conditions will make it difficult to
trying to implement the sort of teaching that implement the curriculum as ideally
the new curriculum expects? intended. Teachers, teacher educators and
institutional leaders will need to discuss how
to adjust the initial stages of implementation
before any training sessions are offered.
Teaching materials
By the time implementation starts, will there be * National policy makers have said the new
enough appropriate teaching materials in most textbooks will be available by the time
classrooms? implementation begins. They need to be
available for teachers before this, since
working with the new textbooks will be an
important part of their training.
English teachers’ socio-economic situation
Are English teachers generally satisfied with * Yes.
their jobs?
Can they live adequately on their salaries * Most teachers feel they need to augment
without having to do further private work? their salaries with private work.
Can teachers reasonably be expected to spend the * If no tangible rewards are offered, the time
extra time that implementation will demand, needed for training needs to be made
without further reward? available within the working day/week.
English exams
What are the most important English exams * English exams matter greatly for entry to
learners have to take? good secondary schools and universities.
When do they occur? * The final year of school.
What do they assess? * They generally assess knowledge about the
language and reading and very simple
writing only. There has been no official
statement that this will change.
Are there any ways in which the demands of * Teachers at lower levels are more likely to
assessment may affect teachers’ and learners’ base their teaching around the curriculum
willingness to work using the new curriculum? than those at higher levels nearer to the
exam.
anywhere will approach the implementation of a complex change will be strongly

influenced by the behaviour of many other people and the extent to which they can
see that relevant external factors have been taken into account. Professional sup-
port for teachers is very important, but so is the provision of a supportive
atmosphere in the implementation environment.
9.4.1 Teachers
Preparing the English teachers to implement the new curriculum cannot be a simple
matter of telling them about what they are supposed to do and then leaving them to
get on with it. The tables show that there are substantial gaps between teachers’
current professional strengths and those that they will need to develop in order to
implement the new curriculum effectively. To bridge these gaps they will need
support both before and during the implementation. Preparations for implementa-
tion will therefore need to decide on how to deal with matters such as the following.
9.4.1.1 Communicating the change to teachers

Local English teachers have so far had little or no direct information about the new
curriculum, although of course rumours are circulating. Ideally, all teachers should
receive similar messages about the new curriculum and what it implies for them.
Local planners thus need to decide on issues like:
what exactly do they need to know? Is the aim just to inform them or also to
answer questions that they may have?
when and how are teachers going to be told about the change? Should they be
told only when preparations for training are complete or before?
who should provide the information, their institutional leaders or the local
educational planners? This decision will determine whether they are briefed
in their schools or brought together elsewhere in one or more groups.
9.4.1.2 Providing professional support for teachers

The tables show that teachers will need considerable training and support to
become able to implement the curriculum (suitably adapted for local circum-
stances – see below) more or less as intended. National policy makers will almost
certainly have set a deadline for implementation to begin. There will need to be
some sort of initial, pre-implementation training to enable the deadline to be met.
However, given the ‘reculturing’ that will be needed for teachers to become able to
teach the new curriculum, other training needs are certain to emerge during the
early stages of the implementation process. An important aspect of preparation is
therefore to decide on which aspects of the new knowledge, skills and experiences
such pre-implementation training should focus on, and which can be left to be
worked on over the first months or years of the actual implementation process
itself.
9.4.1.3 Training before implementation begins

Issues that will need to be decided on here include:
the key content and aims of the pre-implementation training. These will be
influenced by a range of other factors (see 9.4.2–9.4.8 below)
how long the pre-training needs to be to enable trainers to have time to deal
properly with all the essential issues
how the training should be designed to provide an appropriate balance
between confidence building, input, discussion, experiencing new approaches
and techniques, trying them out, etc. (see Malderez and Wedell, 2007 in
chapters 5–7 for more detailed information)
whether this training should include language development for teachers
whose proficiency is poor, or whether this should be provided separately (or
not at all)
whether all teachers should be trained directly or whether a cascade model of
training should be adopted, in which some teachers from each institution or
district within the area are trained and they are then expected to pass the
content of the training on to their colleagues. Since the training is not just a
matter of passing on information, if a cascade model is decided on, those
expected to ‘cascade’ would need additional time to prepare for their role.
9.4.1.4 Training during the early stages of implementation

Some similar and some different issues will need to be addressed, including:
what the focus of such training should be and how it will be linked to what has
been provided above (again, issues at 9.4.2–9.4.8 will influence decisions here)
where and how often it should take place
how long funding will be available to allow training to be facilitated/
organized by external experts (teacher educators) before each school is
expected to develop its own support systems
what preparations institutional leaders will need to be encouraged to make to
enable training to take place as planned
whether it is in fact possible to plan the content of such support in detail at
this stage or whether it would be better to postpone detailed planning of
content until implementation has begun and the areas in which teachers need
further support become clearer. If this decision is taken, it will be
particularly important to develop simple monitoring systems to help identify
such areas once they begin to emerge.
9.4.1.5 Providing a supportive environment for teachers

Providing practical professional support to enable English teachers to develop new
skills and understandings is essential. It is also important to remember that
teachers (like people everywhere) are more likely to continue to be motivated to try
to implement change if they can see that what they are being asked to do is
realistically achievable in their circumstances (see 9.4.6) and is recognized and

appreciated by those around them. Ideally therefore, preparation for imple-
mentation would also include consideration both of classroom realities and of how
the educational (colleagues, institutional leaders, and the local planners them-
selves) and wider environments (parents especially) can be encouraged to show
their support for the change, or at least minimize any disparaging comments or
negative behaviours.
9.4.2 Teacher educators
In an ideal situation, discussion of all issues relating to supporting teachers would

involve the majority of local teacher educators. Here Tables 9.3 and 9.4 suggest
that, given the prevailing tendency to view teaching and learning as principally
involving the transmission of knowledge, local teacher educators will probably be
more comfortable, competent and confident telling teachers about theories and
new approaches and techniques than enabling teachers to experience and practise
these. In addition, few teacher educators are likely to be familiar with the
training principles underlying the design and facilitation of the practical teacher-
development courses that English teachers will need during both types of training
outlined above.
They would therefore benefit from a trainer-training course that focuses on:
skills needed to plan and design practically oriented teacher-development

courses
training and facilitation skills that will enable them to help teachers to, for
example:
‘see’ the differences between their present practices and those expected by
the new curriculum
discuss, bearing their classroom conditions in mind, which aspects of the
change as embodied in the new textbooks it would be most feasible to
begin implementing
experience and practise whichever aspects are agreed upon
Whether such a trainer-training course can be provided of course depends on:
how much time there is before implementation is supposed to begin

funding
whether appropriate trainer trainers are available locally, regionally or
nationally
whether local teacher educators themselves recognize the need and would
therefore participate in such a course positively
If trainer training is not possible, plans for pre- and during-implementation

teacher-support provision will need to be based around utilizing the most relevant
areas of teacher educators’ existing strengths. What form implementation takes,

and the expected outcomes, will need to be adjusted accordingly.
9.4.3 Institutional leaders
The heads of the schools in which the change is to be implemented are the people
in authority with whom teachers most frequently come into contact. They are the
people who through their leadership can strongly influence the extent to which the
school ‘positively welcomes’ the change, and so the ‘moral support’ felt by teachers
who are trying to implement it. They can make it more or less easy for teachers to
participate in whatever during-implementation training is provided. Since their
positive attitude and behaviour is so important, they need to fully understand and
support the change.
As part of their preparation, planners will therefore need to consider issues such
as:
what information about the curriculum change itself, and their role in
supporting it, institutional leaders need to be provided with
in what form such information should be provided and who should be
responsible for providing it
what information about funding each institution will need to have, and how
directive planners ought to be (can be) about how they expect the money to
be spent
whether it will be necessary to be explicit about institutional leaders’
responsibility for creating and maintaining a positive orientation towards
working towards the hoped-for outcomes of the change, and how this can
best be expressed
how to make it as easy as possible for institutional leaders to release teachers
for training before and during implementation, especially since, if teachers
are to feel encouraged and appreciated, the bulk of such training should take
place during working hours.
9.4.4 Learners
It is rare for learners to be explicitly considered when preparing for change

implementation. They, together with teachers, are those who will be most directly
affected by the introduction of the new curriculum. In addition, their cooperation
and willingness to participate when implementation begins will seriously affect
how teachers experience the process, and learners’ satisfaction with their experi-
ences of the new curriculum will often be passed on to parents (see below). It seems
wise therefore to give some consideration to learners at the planning stage and
some issues planners might think about here include:
how the curriculum change will affect the learners most obviously
how the changes in what is expected of them, and the benefits that it is hoped
that they will bring, can best be explained to them
whether it might be wise to have ‘how to explain the new curriculum to the
learners’ as one important discussion topic for all teachers during their pre-
implementation training
9.4.5 Parents
Given the strong competition that increasingly characterizes education in many

contexts, and the role that educational success is felt to have in determining
children’s future prospects, parents’ attitudes to a change process (as a result, for
example, of their children’s responses, or their worries about how it will affect
their children’s exams prospects) can have a strong positive or negative influence
on schools and teachers. Consequently it would be wise for planners to consider:
how, given parents’ (albeit probably unconscious) membership of the

existing educational culture, they can most effectively be introduced to the
purpose of the changes, the implications for teaching and learning and the
hoped-for positive outcomes
whether there is any tangible evidence in the local, regional, national,
international context that could be used to support the claim that the new
curriculum will lead to better outcomes
9.4.6 Actual classroom conditions
Table 9.4 suggests that local classroom conditions are not ideal for achievement of
the hoped-for curriculum outcomes. Local planners are unlikely to be able to
change these conditions in any meaningful way before implementation begins.
Plans to begin implementation therefore need to bear them in mind. Decisions
about the content and structure of both pre- and during-implementation training
will need to consider the fact that teachers will be working in what I would
consider to be ‘large classes’, with learners whose motivation varies, and with little
time during working hours to prepare classes. During the pre-implementation
training, teachers will need to be given time to discuss these realities further and,
with teacher educators, explore how they may influence initial implementation of
the new curriculum. Plans for ongoing training/support during implementation
will hopefully mean that over time teachers in all schools will be able to work out
how to implement the new curriculum more fully.
9.4.7 Teaching materials
Planners need to try and arrange for these (especially the ‘Teacher Books’ if they
exist) to be available well before implementation is expected to start. Teachers, and
teacher educators in particular, need the chance to familiarize themselves with the
information and guidance about new teaching approaches and techniques and how
lessons using the new curriculum are supposed to be organised. The materials are a
physical manifestation of the new curriculum. They will provide a means for
teachers and their trainers on the pre-implementation training courses to see what
is expected to happen in classrooms, and to agree about the best ways in which to
begin the implementation process in local schools. They also represent an
important training resource, enabling teacher educators to demonstrate new
teaching approaches and activities, and teachers to practise using them themselves.
9.4.8 Assessment
Local planners are likely to be only too aware that (as in most parts of the world)
institutional leaders, learners and their parents view exam success as the most
important measure of the success of secondary education. High-stakes exams exert
many more or less direct influences over what happens in school classrooms and on
how those within and outside the education system evaluate the performance of
schools and their teachers and learners.
National policy makers have not as yet planned to redesign the format and
content of such exams to begin to assess the language performance, which is the
hoped-for outcome of the new curriculum, as well as (or eventually instead of)
language knowledge. Consequently, it is almost certain that teachers’ and learners’
enthusiasm for working with the new curriculum will decline as the final year of
secondary school – the examination year – draws closer.
Bearing this in mind, especially if funds are limited, local planners may feel that
their preparations for implementation should focus on the early years of secondary
education during which such exam pressure is least strong. They may also feel that
it is important to develop local-assessment systems that try to explicitly support
the intentions of the curriculum during the first few years of secondary school, by
acknowledging that assessment of learners’ performance is at least as important as
assessment of their knowledge about the language. If this is a priority, then
developing local teachers’ capacities to assess their learners’ performance in a
reasonably valid and reliable manner will become an important focus for training.
9.4.9 Summary
The discussion above shows that preparing for local-change implementation in a

manner that tries to bear in mind the main features of the existing change context
is complex and messy. Decisions about one aspect of the planning, for example
ensuring that teachers are prepared, may be constrained by the need to bear in
mind a range of other issues – for example classroom conditions and what degree of
support teacher educators can in fact provide. Local leaders’ ability to fully
implement a change may be limited by the influence of national issues like high-
stakes tests that actually make implementation more difficult. Funding, and how
to spend it to best effect, is almost always an issue. In addition, given the length of
time that any ‘reculturing’ can take, there are always questions to be asked about
how feasible it really is to plan ahead in great detail, when the issues that actual
implementation gives rise to, and the needs of the individuals involved, are
themselves likely to be change over time. The next section tries to sequence some
of the issues that I have mentioned here.
As in chapter 8, when it comes to deciding a sequence of events the first focus is on

the central figures in any change process: the teachers. Section 9.4 suggested that
providing teachers with the support needed to implement the change as fully as
local circumstances allow would be a two-stage process. It would begin with a first
stage that tried to equip them with a basic understanding of the changes, and with
techniques that would allow them to begin some form of implementation. Their
skills and understandings would then hopefully develop further through ongoing
classroom practice and training during the first stages of actual implementation.
Given that there is almost certain to be time pressure in the form of central
government guidelines (if not deadlines) about when implementation should
begin, one sensible sequence for preparations might therefore be as follows:
1. Planners will hopefully want to make their decisions about the staging of the
implementation process, and about the content and structure of the different
stages of training that will be needed to support it, in consultation with appro-
priate representatives of those whom the process will involve, namely local tea-
chers, teacher educators and institutional leaders. If all these people are to be able
to participate in any meaningful manner, they will need to understand what
changes are proposed for what purposes and what they imply for classroom
teaching and learning. Hence, one of the first things that planners might wish to
do is to arrange appropriate awareness-raising meetings with each of the above
groups as proposed in sections 9.4.1–9.4.3.
2. Once those directly involved have been introduced to the changes and to their
roles in the implementation process, planners will be able to work with repre-
sentatives of each group to make decisions about what is likely to be the most
urgent issue, the content and structure of pre-implementation teacher training. A
possible planning sequence would be to:
(a) decide, bearing local classroom conditions and existing teacher (and teacher
educator) strengths in mind, which aspects of the new curriculum should
be emphasized when implementation begins
(b) agree what new understandings and skills it will be essential for teachers to
have in order to be able to begin such implementation
(c) agree how much time can be made available, where training should take
place and an approximate set of priorities for what has been agreed at (b)
(d) agree on whether the training should cover all teachers, or just some, and if
the latter, which?
(e) assess the extent to which the professional background of the local teacher
educators is suitable for helping teachers to develop such skills/
understandings
(f) agree what trainer training might be needed to bridge any obvious gaps
(g) arrange for such trainer training if time, funds and availability of trainer
trainers allow
(h) agree dates for the pre-implementation teacher training to take place
(i) try and ensure that sufficient copies of the new materials are available for all
teachers and teacher educators well before the training takes place
If it is not possible to provide necessary trainer training then (b) and (c) will need
to be reconsidered to make them achievable with the training skills available.
3. To be able to decide about the structure and duration of ongoing training

provision, planners, again with representatives of each above group as appropriate,
would need to:
(a) agree, given local conditions, which further aspects of the new curriculum
it is reasonable to expect all schools to aim to implement within the first
year or two of the process
(b) agree what new understandings and skills teachers will need to develop to
be able to extend the range of their implementation to cover the above
aspects
(c) (bearing funding in mind) agree on the staffing, frequency and structure of
such training
(d) (in consultation with institutional leaders) agree procedures for enabling
such ongoing training to take place during teachers’ working hours
(e) agree a school-based system to monitor the implementation process,
identify any widespread problems and communicate these to institutional
leaders and local educational administrators/planners
4. Having established the training provision, and through so doing also the extent
to which initial implementation of the new curriculum will need to be adjusted to
meet local classroom realities, the next area for consideration is awareness raising.
For teachers, teacher educators and institutional leaders, this will hopefully have
happened at (1) above. The main group not yet drawn into the implementation
process is members of the wider community, particularly parents. Decisions about
how to communicate with parents with secondary school children will need to be
taken.
5. Detailed planning, beyond the establishment of monitoring systems and

communication channels that will enable local planners to keep abreast of what is
actually happening in their schools, and so be able to use whatever funding they
have available for implementation support as effectively as possible, is unlikely to
be possible before implementation begins. To use funding effectively, once

implementation is under way local leaders will need to monitor two parallel but
interdependent strands of the process. The first is the need to continue to provide
appropriate support to bridge the professional and attitudinal gaps among relevant
groups of people, principally teachers. The second is to consider local language-
teaching conditions and how, over time, these may be made more supportive of
both the immediate implementation process and the achievement of its ultimate
goals. Other local leaders in contextually similar areas of the country are a
potential source of support and also of ideas. Establishing links and regular
meetings would be worthwhile.
9.6 Conclusion
In sections 9.4 and 9.5 I have tried to show the implications for planning of the
main issues arising from Tables 9.3 and 9.4. You will have noticed that I have
been able to deal with them only in general terms. This inability to plan in detail
much beyond the very beginning of an implementation process is one result of
recognizing that complex educational-change implementation as a process depends
on the responses of a wide range of people (and often organizations) in a particular
setting to whatever reculturing the change implies.
If I say that rational and coherent pre-planning can only take one as far as the
early implementation stages, you might be wondering why I have spent so many
pages illustrating how to set about gathering information to inform such plan-
ning! My response would be that the beginning of a change process is an extremely
important indicator of what is (or is not) likely to happen next. If the change
process begins with the majority of the people affected feeling that they under-
stand what is happening and why, that they are being supported in their roles and
that their immediate educational environment is supportive, they are more likely
to be prepared to invest time and energy in developing the new skills (and more
complexly, eventually new ways of thinking) that so much educational change
demands. If they begin implementation viewing the change as both worthwhile
and achievable, they are more likely to invest energy over time in trying to achieve
it despite the unanticipated problems that will arise time and again throughout
the process. In a context where most of those involved in the change process are
positively inclined, I believe that the process is likely to move more directly and
more swiftly (although not necessarily very directly or swiftly!) towards the hoped-
for outcomes than in a context where information about, and support for, the
change is patchy or non existent. Time spent on understanding the change context
and using that understanding in implementation planning is in my opinion very
worthwhile.
Chapter 10
Planning the development of a new initial

teacher education curriculum
In chapters 8 and 9 I looked at how the two sets of questions might guide
planning for changes in what happens in college/school classrooms. Here I use the
same questions to identify issues relevant to the planning of changes to an initial
teacher-education curriculum for English teachers.
10.1 Background
A Minister of Education acknowledges that after over a decade of substantial

financial and human investment in the teaching of English (for example, the
employment of numerous, expensive, expert, national and international con-
sultants to advise on the content and sequence of a new ‘communication-based’
curriculum, the design and writing of a set of new textbooks and ICT learning
materials linked to this curriculum, short training courses for all serving teachers
and opportunities for some of them to visit English speaking countries), less than
5 per cent of learners leave secondary school with a basic ability to communicate in
English, as measured by a pass in the lowest level of an international standardized
test of performance. In addition, the results of a recent test of English teachers’
language proficiency were very disappointing.
The focus of all the above planning and investment has (apparently not very
successfully) been on the development of a new curriculum and linked materials
and trying to enable its implementation by existing teachers in schools. However,
there has so far been no change to the pre-service, university-based training of new
English teachers. They continue to be trained with little apparent regard for
graduating teachers who are well prepared to help learners achieve the hoped-for
outcomes of the new school curriculum.
In this country, as seems to be the case in several contexts, the responsibility for
providing initial teacher training is divided between staff from two different
university departments. Staff from the language departments provide the subject
specialist training in language (linguistics, phonetics, grammar and language
Planning the development of a teacher education curriculum 157
proficiency work) and culture (the literature and history of English-speaking

countries). They also supervise the in-school practical element of the training. The
length and format of this varies from one university to the next, but it always ends
with an assessed ‘exam’ lesson. A pass in this is required for qualification as a
teacher. The other group of staff from education departments is responsible for
generic courses in education (for example, Psychology, History of Education,
Evaluation and Assessment, Classroom Management). In most universities there is
no professional connection between the two departments, and trainees have long
complained that their programme lacks coherence.
The Ministry of Education asks the heads of language departments in the
universities that are responsible for providing such initial training to propose a
draft outline of, and a detailed rationale for, a new pre-service English-language
teacher curriculum that will more clearly link what trainees experience during
their studies to the real teaching roles they will be expected to play when they
enter the secondary-school system. They set a deadline of one year for this plan-
ning process. This chapter considers some of the questions it would be useful for
these university curriculum planners to ask and find answers to, to guide their
planning of a teacher-training curriculum that better prepares its novice teachers
for the classroom conditions in which they will find themselves.
As before I pose and try to answer two sets of questions.
10.2 Questions
The first set of questions aims to identify those who will be most directly affected
by any changes to the initial teacher-training curriculum and to obtain a sense of
their current understandings, skills, beliefs and behaviours.
* Who might these people be in any initial teacher-training environment?
* What questions would you want to ask (about) them?
The second set asks questions about features of the existing conditions in which
initial teacher training takes place, and also about aspects of the schools in which
trainees will eventually work, and what these imply for the content and process of
any new initial teacher-training curriculum.
* Which of the conditions influencing the existing teacher training and
school English-teaching systems would it be relevant to consider?
* What questions would you want to ask about them?
As always there are a range of different groups of people who will be more or less
directly affected by, and whose behaviours and beliefs will influence the imple-
mentation of, any suggested changes to the initial teacher-education curriculum.
In this setting these include:
The university English-specialist teacher educators, whose knowledge and

teacher-teaching skills represent the existing subject teacher-training
capacity. This may not necessarily be adequate for a new curriculum that
tries to prepare teachers to implement the national English curriculum in
secondary school classes. Some staff capacity-building may be necessary.
The university Education-specialist teacher educators who give the same
generic courses to all trainee teachers regardless of their subject specialism.
At present, the education courses are not linked in any way to the other
courses that trainee language teachers follow. Ideally, staff from the
Education department would be involved in discussions about how any new
curriculum might better highlight the connections between generic and
specialist modules.
Trainees. They come into teacher training bringing with them certain
(probably unarticulated) beliefs about (language) learning and teaching
drawn from their long experience as school learners. It is necessary to
understand what they ‘bring with them’, so that plans for the new
curriculum bear these in mind when deciding on content and teaching
approaches.
Those working with trainees in schools, the supervising teachers or mentors.
Ideally they will be involved in the planning process because they will need
to be helped to understand what any new curriculum is trying to achieve if
they are to support trainees appropriately while they are on school-based
teaching practice.
Secondary-school language learners. What do they expect of their teachers?
Are there any general characteristics that need to be considered?
Less directly affected/influential may be:
Institutional leaders at secondary schools. They will have expectations about

the teaching skills, and professional and personal behaviours that novice
teachers ought to have.
Society in general. There will probably be certain unstated expectations of
what teachers ‘should be like’ and how they should behave, deriving from the
national educational culture. (Since the possible influence of educational
culture was discussed quite thoroughly in the previous scenario, I will not
discuss it further here.)
Some questions that local-change leaders could usefully ask about each group
are suggested in Table 10.1.
Table 10.1 Questions that might be asked of (about) the people most affected
by the change.
Who will be affected Questions

Specialist teacher * What view of teacher learning do they have?
educators * What are their areas of subject strength?
* Are both of the above appropriate for what trainees will
need to be helped to know, understand and be able to do if
they are to implement the school curriculum?
* What relationship do they have with members of the
education department?
Members of the * What view of teacher learning do they have?
Education department * What are their areas of subject strength?
* How do they understand the connection between their
courses and those offered by subject specialists?
* What relationship do they have with members of the
Language department?
Supervisors/mentors in * What links exist between them and the university subject
schools specialists?
* What approaches to language teaching are they most
familiar/comfortable with?
* How do they understand their role in teacher training process?
Language learners * What roles do they expect teachers to play?
* What is their attitude to learning English?
School heads * What understandings, skills and behaviours do they expect
from newly graduating teachers?
10.2.2 Questions about the existing conditions in initial English

teacher training and school English learning
Conditions that it could be wise to investigate include:
how training time is currently divided between specialist and Education

courses, and whether this is open to negotiation
the current weightings within specialist courses between different strands of
the programme (knowledge about language, developing language
proficiency, literature and culture, subject-specific pedagogy/methodology
and time spent in schools)
the assumptions about what teachers need to know about and be able to do
that underlie the new school English curriculum and its associated teaching
materials
the systems that currently exist for communicating and working
collaboratively with the mentor teachers who support trainees during their
school practice
the number of children in most secondary-school classes and the number of
hours of English they have each week
the resources that trainees can expect to find in most classrooms

the types and degree of support that novice teachers can expect to receive
from the school community when they first arrive
You may think that anyone professionally involved at a senior level in teacher
education ought to know the answers to most of these questions already, and so
there is little point in asking them. I would agree that some people might, more or
less consciously, know the answers to some or even all of them. However, planning
a coherent and contextually feasible initial teacher-education curriculum again
involves consideration of a range of issues. I therefore feel that even if some
planners feel they know ‘all the answers’, it is still useful to gather all such answers
and display them, so that they are available to inform the implementation dis-
cussions that will be necessary before any final decisions are made. Some questions,
derived from the bullet points above, are shown in Table 10.2.
Table 10.2
Condition Questions
Division of training * What proportion of the overall time is taken up by
time between Education Education/specialist courses?
and the specialism * Is this balance about right?
* What would the procedure be for opening discussions
about possible changes to the content and/or manner of
provision?
Weightings in current * What proportion of the current curriculum time do
specialist curriculum specialist courses spend on:
* knowledge about language?
* developing language skills?
* Literature and Culture?
* developing language-teaching skills?
* understanding and becoming familiar with working in
real classrooms?
* Will these proportions need to be adjusted if the new
training programme is to support implementation of the
school curriculum?
The school curriculum * What are the expected outcomes of the school English
and teaching materials curriculum?
* What do teachers need to know and be able to do to be able
to help learners to achieve them?
* What level and type of support do the teaching materials
provide for teachers?
Cooperating teachers/ * How are they chosen?
mentors * How does the university communicate with them?
* How does the university view their role?
* What do they gain from taking on the role?
* Will changes to the initial teacher-training curriculum
require them to change what they do/how they behave?
Class sizes and hours per * What is the normal class size for a secondary-school
week language class?
* How many hours of English do they have per week?
* Do the above influence how teachers need to work in order
to complete the curriculum?
Classroom resources * Will all learners have copies of the new textbooks?
* What resources can be found in most classrooms?
* Do most schools have computer laboratories/rooms for
language study?
* What aspects of teaching–learning technology do trainees
need to know about and be able to use?
Support from school * Is there a structured induction into school life for novice
community teachers?
* What aspects of school life would it be useful for them to
get to know about and experience during their school
practice periods?
* What does the above imply for the number/length/content/
process of these teaching practice periods?
In contrast to chapter 9, here answers to many of the above questions will be found
within the teacher-training institution itself, or within the schools to which
trainees are normally sent for their periods of teaching practice. Some answers may
also be found in documents. They ought therefore to be fairly quickly and easily
obtainable. However, universities as organizations often have complex internal
relationships. Planners may therefore need to be diplomatic at times, especially
when dealing with information relating to the weighting of current curriculum
provision, since some staff may see any changes to the status quo as professionally
threatening.
Table 10.3 Answers to questions about people.
Questions Answers
Language specialists
What view of teacher learning do they * This varies greatly, but many staff
have? regard themselves primarily as
university lecturers. They see their
subjects as largely content-based and
teach them mostly through lectures, in
what they consider to be an
appropriately academic manner.
What are their areas of subject strength? * Linguistics, Applied Linguistics,
Phonetics, Grammar, Literature,
History, language-skills development
and, to a lesser extent, Methodology.
Are both of the above appropriate for what * Given that the school curriculum that
trainees will need to be helped to know, trainees will be expected to teach
understand and be able to do if they are to emphasizes enabling learners’ language
implement the new curriculum in schools? skills development, in many cases neither
some of the teaching approaches used nor
the theoretical content seem appropriate.
What relationship do they have with * Little or no contact. The modules from
members of the education department? each department run in parallel. There
has never been any formal discussion of
whether or how they might be better
linked.
Education specialists
What view of teacher learning do they * They view trainee teachers like any other
have? undergraduates. They teach the mostly
factual content of their courses through
lectures.
What are their areas of subject strength? * Educational Psychology, Evaluation and
Assessment, the history and current
features of the national education
system, and other generic courses of
potential relevance to all teachers
How do they understand the connection * Most staff do not appear to consider the
between their courses and those offered by specialism of the students that they
subject specialists? teach to be relevant.
What relationship do they have with * Little or no personal contact and no
members of the Language department? formal professional contact.
Trainees
What experience of (language) learning do * A broadly transmission-based approach
they bring with them from secondary to learning generally. Memorization very
school? important for exam success. Some will
have had occasional experience of more
interactive methods from their language
classrooms.
What level of language proficiency do they * A very low level of performance. Some
arrive with? know a lot about English. Very few can
use what they know.
How similar/different are these to the * Different. The curriculum expects
understandings/teaching skills/level of learners to leave school able to use the
proficiency that they will need to develop language at a basic level. This suggests
to be able to implement a version of the that their teachers need to:
new school curriculum? * be confident enough about their own
language proficiency to teach mostly
in English
* know enough about how language
works to be able to provide learners
with a clear grounding in the sound
and grammar systems
* understand enough about how

languages are learned, and be
confident enough about their
teaching skills, to be able to manage
both teacher-led and interactive
classroom activities that are
appropriate for their learners’ ages
and levels
Cooperating teachers/mentors
What links exist between them and the * Such teachers have been appointed by
university subject specialists? their Heads. They receive necessary
paperwork from the university, but have
no direct professional links.
How do they understand their role in the * As supervisors who will (initially) help
teacher-training process? trainees plan their classes. They are
expected to remain in the classroom
when trainees are teaching to evaluate
their work and to assist with any
classroom-management issues.
What approaches to language teaching are * As classroom teachers who have had only
they most familiar/comfortable with? a single short period of in-service
training they often struggle to teach the
new curriculum. Many focus on the
more familiar reading and grammar
sections of the textbook in great detail,
and ignore the sections devoted to the
development of other language skills.
Learners
What roles do they expect teachers to play? * They expect teachers to manage all
learning and to highlight what needs to
be learned (memorized) through the
notes they write on the board.
What is their attitude to learning English? * Many learners see no point in learning
the language. It plays no obvious role in
their daily lives outside the classroom
and is not assessed in any high-stakes
examinations.
Institutional heads
What understandings, skills and * They expect newly appointed teachers to
behaviours do they expect from newly be able to manage classes, teach the
graduating teachers? curriculum, as well as is possible in the
circumstances that exist in the school,
and to teach the allocated textbook at
the same speed as other teachers in their
year.
* They expect them to be neat, polite,
punctual and willing to work hard.
Answers to these questions already suggest aspects of the existing training

curriculum that need thinking about if trainees are to be better prepared for
implementing the school curriculum. The picture becomes even clearer when the
next set of questions are answered.
Table 10.4 Answers to questions about existing conditions.
Questions Answers
Division of training time between the
two departments
What proportion of the overall time is * There is approximately a 30%
taken up by Education/specialist courses? Education/70% specialist subject split.
Is this balance about right? * It could be if the two ‘sides’ of the
training became more clearly linked.
What would the procedure be for opening * Head of the specialist programme would
discussions about possible changes to the in the first place need to talk to the head
content and/or manner of provision? of the Education department, and later
to individual staff offering Education
modules.
Weightings in specialist curriculum
What proportion of the current curriculum
time do specialist courses spend on:
* knowledge about language/
linguistics/grammar, etc.? 20%
* developing personal-language skills? 10%
* Literature and Culture? 20%
* developing language-teaching skills? 5%
* understanding and becoming part of
real classrooms/teaching practice? 15%
Are these proportions appropriate for the * No, the balance seems to be too heavily
new training curriculum? weighted towards the provision of
‘knowledge’. The proportion of time
spent on the development of personal-
language proficiency and the range of
teaching skills needed to implement the
new school curriculum seems
insufficient.
School curriculum and teaching
materials
What are the expected outcomes of the * Learners who can pass an internationally
school English curriculum? validated and standardized test of
performance at basic level.
What do teachers need to know and be able * Know about language and how to help
to do to be able to help learners to achieve learners to know about it too and
them? become confident enough to use what
they know for simple interactional and
transactional purposes. Trainees need to
feel confident about their personal

linguistic proficiency and their teaching
abilities to manage a class, use a range of
activities, interact with learners,
recognize not all learners are the same,
adjust, be flexible, etc.
* What level and type of support do the The set of textbooks that operationalizes
teaching materials provide for teachers? the curriculum comes with teachers’ books
that offer step by step guidance for each
lesson, and also provide links to the parallel
computer-based materials.
Cooperating teachers/mentors
How are they chosen? * According to years of teaching experience.
How does the university communicate * The university has no direct professional
with them? contact with them.
How does the university view their role? * They should be in class with trainees at
all times. They are there to evaluate
trainees, ensure they teach for the
specified number of hours, help them
with preparation/ classroom
management as necessary.
What do they gain from taking on the role? * No tangible benefits, apart from the
opportunity to work with trainees (who
take most responsibility for teaching
their classes for several weeks each year).
Will changes to the initial teacher-training * Yes. Exactly what changes will depend
curriculum require changes in what is on how the role of the teaching practise
expected of them? is conceptualized in the new curriculum.
Class sizes and hours per week
What is the normal class size for a
secondary-school language class? * 45 learners.
How many hours of English do they have * 3–4.
per week?
Do the above influence how teachers need There is insufficient time to complete the
to work in order to complete the whole textbook. Teachers are implicitly
curriculum? pressured to ‘finish’ the book by the end of
the year, since annual tests are based on the
content. This works against teachers using
the book flexibly, making principled
choices, adapting the materials to their
learners’ needs, etc.
Classroom resources
Will all learners have copies of the new * Yes.
textbooks?
What technological resources can be found * None.
in most classrooms?
Do most schools have computer * Yes. One hour per class per week.
laboratories/rooms for language study? Computer room with one computer
between two learners and pre-installed
software and access to the internet.
What aspects of teaching–learning * Trainees will need to know something
technology do trainees need to know about about the type of software that is used in
and be able to use? schools and what aspects of language
development it is thought to support,
how to manage learning in the computer
room and what types of materials on the
internet can be used to support language
learning.
Membership of the school community
Is there a structured induction into school
life for novice teachers? * No.
What aspects of school life would it be Some might be:
useful for them to learn about and * Teacher–learner relationships.
experience during their school-practice * Relationships between colleagues.
periods? * Communication systems in schools –
finding things out, whom to go to
for what information.
* Schools as organizations. How does
the hierarchy work, and how are
relations managed between leaders
and led?
* Where extra materials can be found/
where photocopying, etc. is done.
* Any particular school rituals.
What does the above imply for the * Teaching practice probably needs to be
number/length/content/process of these in several phases. A first phase could
teaching-practice periods? perhaps be spent as a ‘classroom
assistant’ to the mentor teacher, enabling
trainees both to observe language
teaching and learning in the classroom
and to develop a sense of ‘how things are
done’ in the wider school environment.
Later phases could involve taking some,
and eventually complete, responsibility
for teaching a class.
The information in Table 10.4 provides further guidance to curriculum plan-

ners. It identifies issues that will need to be addressed if the new curriculum is to
enable initial trainees to graduate as novice teachers, able to ‘fit’ into existing
schools and teach in a manner that at least reflects the spirit of what the school
English curriculum is trying to achieve.
10.4 Using information to inform decision making
There seem to me to be a number of problems with the programme that is

currently offered.
QUESTION TO THINK ABOUT

From the answers in Tables 10.3 and 10.4, what do you consider the main
problems to be?
I see the following as important.
10.4.1 The content of the existing specialist curriculum
The emphasis here is very much on giving trainees (more or less) relevant
knowledge about language, how language works, and about the history and lit-
erature of the cultures in which the language has developed. Relatively little time
is spent on ensuring that trainees’ own level of language is high enough for them
to feel confident about using the language to teach with, and on developing their
understanding of the curriculum that they will be expected to teach and the
complex ability to flexibly use a range of techniques, activities and materials to do
so. In addition there seems to be little thought given to the potential that the
training period offers for explicitly discussing trainees’ beliefs about (language)
learning and how these differ from those underlying the school curriculum, and for
modelling of the desired flexible, learner-sensitive teaching by university staff.
Finally, the role of the teaching practice within the curriculum will need recon-
sideration, to try to maximize its value as a linking mechanism between the
training programme and the classroom.
10.4.2 The content and role of the Education modules
These currently make no attempt to show how an understanding of generic

educational issues and/or principles is relevant to subject-specific study. Nor is
there any rationale for their positioning within the curriculum. Could they be
adjusted to become more relevant to the needs of trainee language teachers? For
example, could a generic course in Classroom Management introduce techniques
for managing learners working in groups, or provide principles for/practice in
giving clear instructions for activities that learners are expected to do without
teacher supervision? Could a course in Psychology have a section dealing with
affective factors in the classroom, introducing ideas about how ‘motivation’ is
currently understood and what this implies for teaching approaches that might be
used to strengthen learners’ motivation? What negotiations and preparations
would such adjustments to the content, and perhaps the timing, of education
modules entail? Who would need to be involved? Would relationships between
staff in the two departments need to become more collaborative? How might that
be made possible?
10.4.3 The relationship between staff at the university and the

mentors in practice schools
Under the present model there seems to be minimal contact between the uni-
versity staff, who have overall responsibility for the training programme, and the
mentor teachers in schools who play such a potentially important role in sup-
porting the transition from the study setting to the professional working envir-
onment. If the new training curriculum considers teaching practice to be an
important strand of the training process, there will need to be better commu-
nication with and support for mentor teachers. There will also need to be channels
through which they can feed into the content of, and teaching approaches used
during, the training programme in the light of their ongoing experiences of
trainees’ strengths and weaknesses. The traditionally hierarchical relationship in
which university teachers consider that they have little or nothing to learn from
those working in schools, is quite inappropriate for those training teachers in
universities, for whom the school-based mentors ought to represent colleagues who
can make potentially invaluable, context-informed contributions to the overall
success of the training programme.
The current initial teacher-training programme is provided by at least three dis-

parate ‘groups’ (within which there are numerous subgroups, for example the
Linguists, the Phoneticians, the Grammarians, the Literature teachers, the
Methodologists, the Psychologists and the History of Education specialists) who
work with little or no reference to, or understanding of, what other groups are
doing, or of how what they do contributes to the overall training of the language
teacher. Greater coherence between what each group contributes to the ‘whole’
curriculum is clearly desirable. However, before they can begin to work out the
(potential) contribution that each group can make to a new, more coherent, cur-
riculum, planners will need to develop a ‘vision’ of the sort of trainee that they
wish to develop.
If you were asked to develop such a ‘vision’, what would you base your
‘vision’ on?
Some more or less idealistic and/or pragmatic bases around which such a ‘vision’
might be developed include:
the idea of a teacher as someone able to implement the new school English
curriculum. What are the features of such an English teacher?
the idea of the teacher as a social-change agent. What are the features of such
an (English) teacher?
the idea of a teacher who ‘fits’ easily into the national/local educational
culture. What are the features of such a teacher?
a vision based purely on the training resources currently available in the
training environment. What type of knowledge and skills can the existing
staff realistically provide? What kind of (English) teacher will this lead to?
a vision based mainly around theories about language, (language) learning,
(language) teaching, (language) assessment. What do these theories suggest
that a good language teacher knows, is able to do and believes about his own
and others’ learning?
a purely pragmatic view based around the secondary-school classroom reality.
What does a trainee need to know, understand and be able to do, if s/he is to
be able to work effectively with very variably motivated learners in (by my
standards) a fairly large class?
Whatever ‘vision’ is agreed will probably represent a compromise between

idealism and pragmatism. Some issues that may influence the nature of the
compromise are suggested below.
The weighting of specialist modules.

If this is to be changed, there will be implications for the staff who teach
modules that are deemed unnecessary
What will their roles be in the new curriculum?
Will there be funding for capacity-building?
Will they be willing to develop new skills?
The number and content of education modules.

Which are potentially relevant? Which seem less so?
How can relevant modules be more clearly linked with the needs of
specialist trainees?
Can those that seem less relevant be cut from the curriculum?
Who would have the final say about the above questions? How could they
be approached?
The certification of trainees’ language proficiency.

Should trainees have to pass a recognized language exam in order to
graduate?
Should trainees whose language development is too slow (as measured by
some agreed marker) be removed from the programme?
When?
How much language-development work will be needed to achieve
whatever goal is decided on?
If an underlying principle of the new curriculum is that the teaching trainees

receive from university staff during their language development (and other
courses) should aim to model the type of teaching we hope they will be doing
by the time they graduate:
What changes does this imply for the way in which language (or other
subjects) are taught and assessed?
Are current staff able to make such changes?
Ehat capacity-building would be needed over what length of time?
Is funding likely to be available?
The subject methodology modules.

How many of these modules should there be?
What aspects of teaching should they focus on?
How closely should they be linked to the teaching-practice periods?
Teaching-practice periods in schools.

How often and when should they take place?
How long for?
What is/are their role(s)?
What support/encouragement/opportunities to participate will the
university need to provide for mentor teachers in order to enable them in
turn to support trainees appropriately?
Assessment of trainees’ teaching ability/skill.

Does being assessed on a single exam lesson ‘fit’ the principles
underpinning whatever ‘vision’ has been agreed?
What and/or who will need to be developed/prepared for an alternative
approach to assessment to be implemented?
Reaching a conclusion about the curriculum ‘vision’ requires juggling a huge

range of factors. The decisions that are made will potentially affect a large number
of colleagues in both schools and the university. The final section below suggests
an order in which the planning process might proceed.
This book has frequently stressed the desirability of involving as many repre-
sentatives as possible of those affected by the change in decision making at all
stages of the change process. Here I find myself slightly contradicting what I have
said earlier, since for the sake of practicality I suggest that only a small group of
people should be involved in the first stage of the suggested process below.
1. Given the range of factors that will need to be considered, I see the first stage as
involving only the (probably) small group of staff from the specialist department
who have been charged with leading the planning process. I assume that if
questions similar to those above have been asked, it is they who will probably have
asked them, and they who will have spent time thinking about the answers and
what they imply. I therefore think (given that there is a deadline) that it would be
most practical for them to develop a first draft of, and rationale for, the ‘vision’ and
its main implications for the curriculum content and process.
2. At the next stage everyone immediately affected needs to be given the

opportunity to become involved. One means of enabling this would be to hold a
well-publicized open meeting to which members of the three groups responsible
for providing training are invited. Ideally, Education staff, school-based mentors
and any Language staff likely to find suggested curriculum changes difficult would
be invited personally by a senior member of the ‘core’ planning group at (1). In my
experience, an interested minority (‘vanguard teachers’, see chapter 2.1) will
attend. At this meeting the drafts developed at (1) above will be shared with
everyone, and those present will have the opportunity to comment/ask questions.
The meeting will also provide an opportunity to invite representatives from each
interested group to join the planning team.
3. Depending on the nature of comments made/questions asked, the now aug-

mented planning team may need to have one or more a further meetings to redraft
(1) and one or more further versions of ( 2) to present the new versions, until a
widely agreed set of principles underlying the change, and a new weighting of
curriculum content that is consistent with the principles, is reached.
4. At this point the planning group may need to split up according to the ‘strands’
of the curriculum (language, literature and culture, language proficiency, subject
pedagogy, education, teaching practice) to consider questions such as those
below.
What each strand (potentially) contributes to the new curriculum.

What this means in practice in terms of what modules should be trying to
achieve.
What the human-resource implications are.
What capacity-building work would be needed before and during
implementation to enable university-/school-based staff to fulfil their roles.
This process is likely to involve cycles of working as sub-groups and reporting

back to the whole group, before the content an sequence of the new curriculum
becomes clear enough for a draft curriculum to be drawn up.
5. A meeting similar to that at (2) at which the draft curriculum is presented and
explained, and at which comments and questions are solicited. It is only at this
stage, when the proposed change takes the tangible form of new draft curriculum,
that ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ emerge in the form of those whose sub-specialisms have
‘won’ or ‘lost’ prominence within the new draft. A period of negotiation,
adjustment and compromise is virtually certain to follow, before a final version of a
new curriculum (together with a rationale and suggestions for the capacity-
building support that will be needed) can be agreed by most of those who will be
involved should it be implemented.
6. This final version can then be presented to the Ministry as a document that is
widely (although almost certainly not fully) supported by those whom it affects in
the university that has proposed it.
10.6 Conclusion
This section of the book has tried to demonstrate a means whereby change-
planners might begin to gather information to guide their future action. The
tables and bulleted lists give an illusion of neatness, certainty and precision that
cannot fully represent the process when real people are trying to plan in real
change settings. Nonetheless, I hope you see that through a process that begins by
asking fairly simple questions it is possible to obtain a wealth of information that
can usefully inform the decision-making process at either the initial planning
stage (chapter 10) and/or the planning for implementation stage (chapters 8 and
9). Even where the questions seem simple and the answers self-evident, I believe
that consciously going through the process, even if only quickly, remains a
worthwhile awareness-raising exercise in itself. It will at the very least make it
more difficult for planners to ignore important features of their baseline context
when making their implementation plans.
I would like to make a few observations about fundamental aspects of educa-
tional change that I feel have been illustrated or reinforced in this section of the
book.
1. Although educational-change initiatives can vary greatly in their scale, the

questions that planners would be wise to ask to obtain information to inform their
implementation planning, and the range of information that answers can provide,
are the same for smaller-scale changes (chapters 8 and 10) and larger-scale ones
(chapter 9).
2. Where an educational change is introduced nationally, the form in which it is

initially implemented will need to vary to accommodate different local human and
material resources (chapter 9). This is normal, since no country is completely
homogeneous in every way. What I believe matters at the beginning of the
implementation stage, is not whether all examples of implementation are iden-
tical, but instead whether the majority of local attempts at change implementation
are genuinely trying to introduce at least some of the spirit of the change to their
classrooms. This is much more likely to be so, if the initiation stage of the change
has tried to help all those affected to understand what that spirit is (see Table 4.1
in the Conclusion to section 1). For example, if a central aim of the national
change is to introduce learning activities that will promote greater interaction
between learners in their classrooms, then any initial implementation attempts
that do try to incorporate such activities, even if (due to local variables) only
occasionally and imperfectly to begin with, is in my opinion implementing

change. Assuming that appropriate on-going implementation support is available
and continues to be provided, greater convergence towards the desired change
practices is likely to occur over time as local expertise and confidence develop.
3. The national policy makers in chapter 7 (in section 2) provided only an outline
framework to guide the implementation of their change. I suggested that this was
appropriate for a national change that will affect very large numbers of learners,
since national policy makers, even if they carried out a thorough ‘baseline study’,
would not be able to anticipate and draw up appropriate plans for all the very
different implementation contexts for which they are nominally responsible. What
national policy makers can, and ideally will, do is ensure that their local repre-
sentatives are provided with change-planning-implementation funds and that they
are fully briefed about the change, so that local leaders are equipped to make
appropriate local plans (see Table 4.1, in the Conclusion to section 1). However,
even at the local level, as chapter 9 shows, the scope for detailed long-term
planning is often limited. While it is possible to plan how to prepare for, begin,
and monitor the local implementation of a national change, and to establish
systems for supporting teachers once it has begun, it is not possible to plan in
detail very far in advance. It is only once implementation is under way that it will
become possible to see exactly what aspects of change implementation are most
problematic and so plan to provide appropriate further support.
This idea that even at local level, detailed planning can reach little further than
the start of the implementation stage, and that further planning will need to
follow based on implementers’ lived experience, again highlights the inappro-
priacy and unhelpfulness of viewing educational-change implementation as a
purely rational linear process, whose stages which can be planned in detail, in
advance, in a top-down manner.
4. The above points reinforce the importance of recognizing change imple-

mentation as a process that evolves (in different ways in different local contexts)
rather than as an event that occurs (see chapter 1). They also support the view
(raised in chapter 5) that the implementation stage of the process is bound to
be cyclical and incremental rather than linear. By this I mean that implementation
of educational change can be visualized as an ongoing series of trying
out/implementing-monitoring-adapting-trying out/re-implementing-monitoring-
adapting . . . cycles. If appropriately supported, the experience of numerous cycles
over time will hopefully move implementers closer both to a fuller understanding
of the principles underlying the change, and to implementing the fullest version of
the change that is compatible with the existing variables in their own evolving
context.
Chapter 11
Setting the scene for successful change:

In this final short chapter I note a small number of fundamental issues that will
need to be addressed before any of the suggestions made in this book can begin to
be achieved.
The cases in section 2 and the scenarios in section 3 draw on real-life experiences
of educational-change initiatives on four different continents. There are of course
geographical, political, socio-economic and cultural differences between and
within the various contexts, which also affect their education systems. Despite
such differences, I feel that the systems share certain basic features, which make it
difficult for them to successfully implement large-scale educational changes that
entail any significant degree of reculturing. I believe that these features are also
shared, to differing degrees, by state-education systems almost everywhere, and
that they help to explain some reasons why the following continues to be true.
We can produce many examples of how educational practices could look

different, but we can produce few, if any, examples of large numbers of
teachers engaging in these practices in large-scale institutions designed to
deliver education to most children (Elmore 1995 in Fullan 2001: 5).
A LAST QUESTION
Can you think of any reasons why there are so few obvious examples of large-
scale educational changes that have unambiguously achieved their stated
aims?
I think some central reasons include the following.

Setting the scene for successful change: Beginning at the beginning 175
National educational policy makers are reluctant to

acknowledge that many change initiatives start from some
version of a ‘transmission-based’ view of education
I believe that the process of implementing a reculturing of an education system

towards a more flexible and dynamic view of teaching and learning continues to
represent a considerable challenge for those involved in trying to introduce edu-
cational changes in all contexts due to a reluctance to acknowledge where change is
starting from.
Over the past decades there has been an enormous volume of public discussion
(and academic research) about, for example, the challenges that globalization poses
for education, the need to recognize learning as a lifelong process and the roles that
technology can play in developing pedagogies that will lead to more interactive
and personalized learning opportunities. Despite this discussion, I believe that the
longstanding view that the central role of the teacher is to pass on a largely
predetermined body of knowledge/set of skills to learners remains deeply
embedded within classrooms in many education systems.
What evidence do I have for this claim, other than my own ongoing engage-
ment with education systems in different parts of the world? Since educational
cultures are not transparent, it is difficult to collect definitive data about their
nature. Support for my assertion comes from an overview of approaches to the
teaching and learning (of English) in East Asia (Nunan 2003) and to education
more generally in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD) countries (Riley 2000).
The prevailing notion of teaching and learning remains one in which,
according to an OECD study, knowledge, competencies and values are pre-
defined and stored in curricula, tests and accredited textbooks. (Posch 1996
in Riley 2000: 42)
At the time that the above data was reported on, most OECD members were ‘high
income’ countries from Europe or North America. If this view of teaching and
learning prevailed in these countries, despite educational rhetoric espousing very
different teaching–learning approaches, then I believe it was likely to be prevalent
elsewhere also. OECD is expanding all the time, and its membership is increas-
ingly representatively distributed worldwide. Currently it is carrying out a
Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) across member countries.
The website suggests that TALIS will provide an overview of teaching practices
and beliefs in OECD countries:
The quality of the learning environment at the classroom level is influenced
by the teaching methods and classroom practices used by teachers. TALIS
will not measure the effectiveness of teachers or of different teaching prac-
tices. Rather, it will contrast profiles of teaching practices, attitudes and
beliefs among the participating countries. In terms of teaching practices,
survey responses from teachers in TALIS will be summarised to examine
whether different teaching practices can be identified, such as practices that
tend to focus on direction from the teacher and others that are more open-
ended in their approach. (OECD website, 2008)
TALIS will report in 2009, and the conclusions will provide further evidence as to
whether the claim that I make here is valid.
If the claim is true, then in the very competitive twenty-first-century world
environment it is not surprising that national-change initiators in most contexts
are reluctant to admit (to themselves and the wider world) that some form of a
‘transmission based’ approach remains the starting point from which many of their
teachers, learners, institutional leaders, educational administrators and members of
the wider society will begin any personal process of educational change. However,
this unwillingness to acknowledge their change participants’ starting point, and so
to begin their change initiatives ‘where people are’, makes it impossible for change
planning to be situated in the lived reality of those whom the change will affect.
Such ‘wishful planning’ in my opinion contributes greatly to the lack of success
characteristic of so many educational change initiatives.
Little encouragement for people to share personal meanings

of key educational concepts
Perhaps because the above view of education is so deeply embedded, there is

surprisingly little opportunity and/or encouragement in most education systems
that I have encountered (and educational-change processes within them) for tea-
chers, teacher trainers, institutional heads and educational policy makers at all
levels to articulate and question what is meant by fundamental educational terms
like teaching–learning–knowing. Since there is no tradition of discussion, educational
changes are often introduced with little examination of the extent to which the
achievement of key change aims (for example, learner-centred-classrooms) will require
people affected by the change to develop a different understanding of these
apparently familiar terms. This again represents a lack of consideration of what
degree and type of reculturing the rhetoric of change actually entails for those
affected, and is, I believe, a further reason for the lack of actual change brought
about by many change initiatives.
Reculturing needs to begin ‘above’ the teachers
Linked to both of the above, and also to the idea of how people feel about change
(see chapter 1.3), is the reality that teachers whose prior experience has been in a
broadly transmission-based system will need to feel reasonably confident before
they can be expected to be enthusiastic about trying out what for them may be
radically new teaching approaches involving unfamiliar ways of configuring and/or
managing classes and/or organizing activities that may have multiple possible
outcomes. Enabling such confidence is of course the responsibility of those leading
the change process. However, if transmission-based views of education remain as
deeply embedded, and opportunities to discuss the principles underlying educa-

tion as few, as I suggest above, then who within the educational setting will have
the understandings and skills to be able to help teachers develop such confidence?
As Table 4.1 (in the Conclusion to section 1) tries to show, educational changes
that require the reculturing of teachers cannot be introduced with any expectation
of widespread success, without first beginning to address the necessary reculturing
of those whose role it is to support teachers’ reculturing.
Poor communications between the interdependent ‘parts’ of

any education system affect the outcomes of the ‘whole’
The cases in section 2 (and also the original examples from which I created the
scenarios) suggest that there are frequently poorly developed communication/
consultation mechanisms between different levels of education systems, and even
between those working at the same level or within the same institution. This may be
because broadly transmission-oriented educational cultures tend to be associated with
fairly conservative hierarchical organizational cultures (see Figure 3.2) where the
development of ‘open’ channels of communication has not traditionally been a
priority.
Within an educational-change process, lack of open communication makes it
difficult for change participants working at different levels of, or with different
responsibilities for, an educational-change process to see themselves as part of a
‘whole’ system. They are less likely to be aware of how their ‘part’ in the change
process can contribute positively to the ‘whole’. Instead each ‘part’, if actively
participating at all, focuses only on its own contribution. Given that successful
implementation, especially of a large-scale educational-change, clearly requires a
high degree of collaboration and open and regular communication between large
numbers of people, this tendency again seems unhelpful for the successful
implementation of educational change.
If educational change is to succeed in any setting, it needs to start from where

people are. If the ‘gap’ between what affected groups of people currently under-
stand and what the change requires them to understand is great, then the necessary
preparation for the change will need to take longer. Ultimately, short cuts do not
work and introducing change initiatives that ignore this simple truth amounts, in
my opinion, to little more than the symbolic triumphalist action (Goodson 2001)
referred to in section 1.
So at its simplest the message of this book is that if you are actively involved in
leading or supporting some or all aspects of an educational change, begin at the
beginning with an honest appraisal of the existing realities of the people whom
you are responsible for. Once again it is a matter of asking questions and acting on
the answers in a way that will support the change process. A basic set of questions
for most occasions might be:
1. What ideas about learning and teaching underlie the change? What do
these ideas assume people understand and are able to do? What teaching–
learning conditions do they assume?
2. To what extent do the people you are responsible for understand what is
needed? To what extent can they do what is needed? Are learning
conditions adequate to begin implementation?
3. What are the main professional and material gaps between (1) and (2)?
4. What possibilities exist for helping people ‘bridge the gaps’? Which of
these possibilities can be carried out with existing material and human
resources? Can anything be done about material gaps?
5. What opportunities can be offered to ‘bridge the gaps’ before
implementation begins? Once implementation has begun?
6. What is the best way of monitoring what happens in classrooms once
implementation begins?
7. In the existing circumstances, what is the best way of continuing to be
supportive of the people (or of providing better material conditions) over
time?
Participating in an educational-change process in any capacity can be very

worrying and tiring. It can also be professionally and personally exciting and
rewarding (Oplatka 2005). How you and other people experience the process will
very much depend on how well it is managed and led. This book, like any other,
cannot possibly anticipate all the factors that might influence how people feel in
and react to a particular change process. However, if I am trying to imagine how
others might feel or react when confronted with a challenging change, I have
always found it helpful to think about how I feel and react when I feel unconfident,
and use that as a starting point for any planning that I need to do.
I very much hope that if you are involved in leading or managing educational
change in some capacity, you will find that some of the ideas I have suggested
make sense and are helpful, and so contribute to making your involvement in the
process a more positive experience, both in terms of its effect on you personally and
in terms of how what you do affects others. Good luck.
I would be really interested to hear from you, whether about your opinion of
this book, or about your educational-change experiences.
My email address is: m.wedell@education.leeds.ac.uk.
Please get in touch.
References
Elmore, P. (1995), ‘Getting to scale with good educational practice’, Harvard Edu-
cational Review, 66/1, 1–26.
Graddol, D. (2006), English Next. London: British Council.
Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (Japan), ‘Regarding
the establishment of an action plan to cultivate Japanese with English abilities’,
www.mext.go.jp/english/topics/03072801.htm (accessed 30 August 2008).
Nunan, D. (2003), ‘The impact of English as a global language on educational policies

and practices in the Asia-Pacific region’, TESOL Quarterly, 37/4, 589–613.
OECD, ‘Teaching and learning international survey’, http://www.oecd.org/
document/0/0,3343,en_2649_39263231_38052160_1_1_1_1,00.html (accessed
2 September 2008).
Riley, K. (2000), ‘Leadership, learning and systemic reform’, Journal of Educational
Change, 1, 39–55.
Wedell, M. (2003), ‘Giving TESOL change a chance: supporting key players in the
curriculum change process’, System, 31/4, 439–56.
Index
A, B change leadership 65–7

A levels 43 training 47
academic skills 105 change participants 20
accountability 15, 26 change planning 19
activities 107-8 change process 18, 19, 20, 99–100
administrators 34, 44, 45, 62, 115 change-planners 14
adoption 21 children
adults 103 parental supervision 73
Africa, education system 4 secondary school 154
applied linguistics 82 civil servants 29, 38, 65
assessment 27, 32, 43, 61, 77, 92, 102, class sizes 24, 31, 104, 115, 124, 161,
104, 113, 127, 132, 137, 145, 152 165
formal 109 classes 159
methods 16 classroom activities 45, 91, 92
national 140 classroom behaviours 38
systems 24, 139, 140, 152 classroom beliefs 18
trainees 169 classroom conditions 45, 62, 103, 104,
Australia 56 137, 140, 142, 146, 149, 151, 152,
baseline studies 24, 61, 70, 87, 104, 153
113, 117, 124, 140, 173 classroom management 45, 167
budgets 27 style 45
classroom practices 18, 34, 40, 46, 105,
C 152
Central Europe 56 classroom teachers 90
education system 4, 18 classroom teaching 71, 90
central government 73, 90 classrooms 2, 17, 18, 21, 23, 27, 30, 31,
change documents 20 32, 33, 34, 43, 44, 46, 47, 61, 69,
change implementation 19, 47 72, 79, 83, 88, 89, 91, 93, 95, 97,
change implementers 86 99, 100, 101, 111, 114, 123, 124,
change initiation 6 126, 152, 154, 156, 167, 172, 175
change initiatives 84, 87 learner numbers 139
change leaders 31, 38, 41 resources 161, 165
Index 181
secondary schools 168 E

South Africa 35 East Asia 175
technology 25 East Europe, education system 18
CLT see communicative language education, primary 43
teaching education specialists 162
communication of information 70 education systems 13, 15, 16, 31, 46,
communicative approaches 91 53, 61, 64, 73, 79, 89, 90, 92, 100,
communicative language teaching (CLT) 115, 116, 123, 124, 136, 139, 151,
97 175, 176, 177
communicative teaching 89 Central Europe 18
competencies 175 East Europe 18
computer laboratories 126, 166 national 13
computer literacy 130 state secondary 136
computer technicians 127 Educational (Project) Management
computers 25, 129 programmes 3
confidence building 148 educational administrators 4, 11, 22, 24,
consultation 31, 115 25, 34, 38, 74, 93, 97, 136, 176
continuation 21 educational change practitioners 2
cultural continuity 92 educational content 43
cultural homogeneity 31 educational culture 101
curricula 89 educational institutions 14
curriculum see also national curriculum educational leaders 18, 97, 100
16, 45, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67, 71, 75, Educational Leadership programmes 3
77, 83, 102, 124, 128, 131–2 educational policy 108
content 170 educational practices 174
documents 16 educational reforms 1
draft 171 educational setting 101
educators 115
guidelines 105
employment 89
language 92
employment opportunities 15
outcomes 151
English curriculum 67
primary 104
English language education 44
process 170
English teachers 64–88, 103
specialist 167 equality of opportunity 15, 16, 26
teacher education 82, 90, 156, 160 Europe 175
teacher training 80, 157 examinations 70, 90, 93, 97, 99, 100,
three-year programme 75 101, 113, 135, 145, 151
training 163 national 32
Curriculum Planning and Design
programmes 3 F, G
fact-based knowledge 116
D Far East, education system 4
decentralization 64, 70, 73, 79, 86 funding 27, 29, 32, 53, 65–7, 78, 82,
decision making 40, 62, 81, 167 89, 90–93, 103, 111, 148, 152,
national 52 154
demonstrations 111 commitment 27
dissertation supervision 77 funds 153
distance learning, programmes 83 GCSEs 43
draft curriculum 171 globalization 89, 135, 175
182 Index
effects 14 Language Pedagogy

techno-globalization 5 PhD programme 82
government departments 3 language teaching 126–34
organizational culture 38 software 126
graduates 68, 79, 126 leaders 3, 4, 14, 39, 40, 44, 46, 67,
graduating teachers 156 98
leadership 53, 80, 99
H, I practices 38
heads of department 3 league tables 12
headteachers 74, 159 learner behaviour 5
higher education 89 learner styles 16
Higher Education Law 80, 82 learners 4, 5, 11, 16, 17, 22, 25, 26, 30,
human resources 2 32, 33, 34, 45, 62, 69, 72, 89, 91,
human systems 19 93, 98, 100, 101, 105, 107, 115,
ICT 123, 124, 126–34, 156 127, 128, 129, 131, 137, 138, 140,
assisted learning 126 145, 145, 150, 151, 158, 159, 163,
172, 175
implementation 6, 26
assessment 145
processes 24
assessment system 140
implementation stage 29–42
classroom behaviour 143
inflation 73, 86
cultural backgrounds 31
initial teacher education programmes 8
motivation 167
initiation stage 27
performance 43, 152
in-school supervisors 78 learning 1, 5, 16, 24, 25, 32, 40, 124,
in-service programmes 99 127, 129, 133, 136, 137, 150, 174,
in-service teacher development 139 177
in-service training 89, 90, 93, 94–6 ICT assisted 126
inspectors 12, 138, 143 language learning 109
institutional administrators 37 shared learning 37
institutional heads 163, 176 learning activities 92, 172
institutional leaders 6, 12, 24, 30, 32, learning behaviours 123
37, 45, 52, 79, 97, 132, 137, 138, learning environment 131
140, 143, 148, 149–50, 151, 153, learning materials see materials
154, 175 learning opportunities 175
secondary schools 158 learning outcomes 46, 83
institutional performance 17 learning practices 83
institutionalization 21 learning process 131
investments 156 learning resources 24
learning-teaching process 91
J, K, L legislation 83
Japan 45, 57, 135 lifelong learning 175
job opportunities 84 literature 21
jobs 69 local administrators 12, 27, 100
knowledge 33, 175 local authorities 73
fact-based 116 local change leaders 66
language curriculum 92 local education administrators 48, 52,
language education 62 73, 79, 102, 124
language learning 109 local educational leaders 27, 29
computer-based 129 local educational planners 102
Index 183
local government 64, 73 O, P

local leaders 47, 62, 124, 140 OECD see Organisation for Economic
local leadership 80 Cooperation and Development
local planners 85, 151 Organisation for Economic Cooperation
local practices 23 and Development (OECD) 175
local representatives 31 organizational culture 38, 40
outcomes 5, 11, 47, 64, 136, 150, 164
M parents 22, 23, 25, 26, 30, 32, 45, 52,
MA programmes 77 62, 64, 67, 69, 74, 91, 97, 100, 103,
management 53 104, 113, 115, 137, 138, 143, 145,
structure 38 145, 151, 154
materials 11, 16, 24, 31, 33, 37, 61, 64, peer mentoring 37
76, 77, 81, 93, 95, 100, 103, 107, personal taxation 15
108, 109, 110, 116, 128, 131–2, planners 2, 6, 45, 61
139, 140, 145, 151-2, 153, 156, 159, Ministry of Education 71
160, 167 planning 2, 4, 20, 24, 31
mentor teachers 167 process 20, 170
mentoring policies
peer mentoring 37 implementation 15
mentors 159, 160, 163, 165 national education 74
methodology 77 policy adjustments 27
Ministry of Education (MoE) 64, 65, 67, policy changes 11, 76
76, 82 policy decisions 11
planners 71 policy documents 21, 112
policy makers 71 policy makers see also national policy
mobilization 21 makers 5, 6, 11, 14, 17, 18, 20, 22,
MoE see Ministry of Education 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31,
40, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 52, 53,
N 61, 62, 65, 66, 67, 70, 72, 75, 79,
national change policy 31 81–2, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90,
national consultation 102 92, 93, 99, 100, 102, 103, 105, 111,
national coordinating body (NCB) 112, 113, 115, 116, 124, 135, 136,
49–51, 52, 53 139, 140, 147, 151, 172, 174, 176
national curriculum see also curriculum Ministry of Education 71
1, 12, 64, 72, 74, 79, 90–91, 109, policy making systems 52
135–55 politicians 44
guidelines 91 politics 4, 20
national education policy 74 PowerPoint presentations 46
national policies 40, 99 primary education 43
national policy makers (NPM) see also primary schools 102–20
policy makers 49–51 primary teachers 104
NCB see national coordinating body training 106, 107
New Zealand 56 professional behaviour 19
NGOs see Non-government professional development 1, 27, 71,
Organizations 92
Non-government Organizations 3 support 78
North America 18, 56, 175 workshops 77
novice teachers 8, 166 professional identity 34
NPM see national policy makers professional training skills 105
184 Index
professionalism 146 South Africa, classrooms 35

teacher training 81 specialist courses 164
public servants specialist curriculum 167
grading 80 specialist trainees 169
salaries 80 standardization 15
Public Service Law 80 standards 15, 17
pupils 67 state education 77
systems 174
Q, R state secondary education system 135
qualifications 105, 106, 107, 109 state sector 62
reculturing 17, 18, 19, 29, 31, 32, 33, state system 11, 64
34, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 47, 53, 61, status 69
76, 92, 96, 100, 123, 124, 147, 152, strategic planning 81
154, 176 stress 40, 77, 86, 98
reflective teachers 71, 72 students 45, 95
reform goals 34 learning outcomes 18
regional planners 108, 112 numbers 81
research 23 recruitment 68, 69
resources 31, 104, 124, 160 supervisors 138, 159, 143
routinization 21 support 159
Russia 57 systems 63
syllabus design 77
S syllabuses 12, 74, 76, 77, 80, 81, 128
salaries 69, 85, 86, 115
school curricula 11 T
school heads 159 TALIS see Teaching and Learning
school leaders 11, 25, 31, 34, 45, 48, 62, International Survey
75, 79, 87, 97, 104 targets 17
school system 82 teacher development 32, 76
schools 67, 71, 76, 99 courses 149
administration 64 teacher education 66, 71, 116
budgets 73 curriculum 82, 90, 156, 160
educational culture 74 provision 4, 145
geographical location 30 reflective model 76
organizational culture 38 system 139
primary 109, 113 Teacher Education programmes 3
secondary 102, 156 teacher educators 3, 11, 27, 30, 32, 34,
secondary education 92, 151 92, 137, 138, 140, 142, 145, 148–9,
secondary school system 157 151, 152, 153, 158
secondary schools 89, 102, 156, 158 specialist 159
classes 158 teacher learning 111, 162
classrooms 168 teacher performance 17
institutional leaders 158 teacher trainers 48, 52, 95, 101, 176
teachers 93 teacher training 64, 67, 68, 70, 71, 75,
shared learning 37 77, 88, 101, 103, 105, 109, 112,
social development 100 158
social stability 26 colleges 65, 68
social transformation 18 curriculum 80, 157
software, language teaching 126 professionalism 81
Index 185
programmes 82, 108, 109, 110, 168 teaching behaviours 84, 92, 109, 116,
provision 114 123
systems 140 Teaching English to Young Learners
teacher-learner behaviour 64 (TEYL) 103, 104, 105, 106, 108,
teacher-learner roles 16 109, 111, 112
teacher-learning principles 88 activities 108
teachers 5, 12, 16, 17, 22, 24, 25, 27, handbook 112
29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37, 40, 41, teacher training 108
45, 46, 47, 48, 52, 62, 67, 70, 72, theory 109
74, 75, 87, 91, 95, 98, 100, 101, training materials 106
109, 110, 117, 124, 128, 129, 131, teaching materials see materials
133, 137, 138, 140, 142, 145, teaching methods 130, 131
146–8, 149, 151, 152, 153, 154, teaching practice 36, 69, 74, 78, 79,
160, 163, 165, 175, 176 105, 167, 169
classroom 3, 4, 90 teaching practices 39, 83, 84, 175
evaluation 45 teaching profession 24
graduating 97, 156 teaching resources 24
head teachers 74 teaching roles 116
initial teacher education programmes team work 34
8 technicians 129, 130, 133
in-service training 94–6 techno-globalization 5
novice teachers 8, 166 technology 123, 165
preparation 139 classrooms 25
primary 104, 106, 107 teenagers 103
professional development 92 terminology 1
professional support 147 TESOL (Teachers of English to
reflective 85 Speakers of Other Languages)
salaries 1, 69, 73, 74, 80, 92, 115 programmes 3
secondary 93 test designers 11
socio-economic situation 145 testing 77
status 73, 115, 140 tests 175
stress 40 textbooks 90, 93, 99, 101, 128, 136,
support 35 156, 165, 175
technical training 133 TEYL see Teaching English to Young
trainee 158 Learners
training 25, 108 three-year programme (3YP) 65, 66, 72,
university 83 76, 77, 79, 80, 82, 84
vanguard teachers 37 curriculum 71, 75, 87
working conditions 1 graduates 72, 80, 84
teaching 1, 5, 16, 24, 25, 32, 76, 82, implementation 72, 78, 79
124, 135, 137, 150, 174, 177 initiatives 74
classroom 71 institutions 70, 73, 75, 87, 88
communicative 89 qualifications 82
methodology 76 salaries 68
teaching activities 95 staff 68, 69, 70, 76, 78, 80, 81, 83,
Teaching and Learning International 87, 88
Survey (TALIS) 175 students 79
teaching approaches 11, 16, 33, 130, trainees 78
131 training 75
186 Index
timescales 27 training curriculum 163

tiredness 86 training needs 148
trainee teachers 158 training programmes 36, 106, 108, 167
trainees 67, 74, 75, 76, 80, 93, 95, 96, development 78
98, 115, 158, 160, 162, 167, 169 teaching 78
assessment 169 training techniques 110
three-year programme 78 training time 159
trainer development 110 transmission of knowledge 16
trainers 3, 98, 106, 108, 109, 110, 114,
148 U, V, W
skills 108 undergraduates 82, 94
trainer-trainers 103 unemployment 73
trainer-training 32, 52, 103, 106, 111, universities 23, 64, 65, 66, 68, 70, 92,
112, 149, 153 93, 94, 99, 157, 161, 165
programmes 104, 105, 110, 111, 112 autonomy 80
training 114, 129, 132, 133, 148, 152, departments 67
153, 154 entrance tests 139
cascade model 148 staff 92, 95
investment in 99 teachers 83
provision 93, 133, 153, 154 values 175
training activities 110 vanguard teachers 37
training courses 36, 37, 112 working conditions 85

02.2015martin Wedell Planning For Educational Change

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Planning for Educational Change

Also available from Continuum

Teaching Teachers – Angi Malderez and Martin Wedell

Typeset by YHT Ltd, London

Section 1: Understanding Educational Change

Section 2: Case Studies

Section 3: Planning to Implement Educational Change:

Terminology: Change innovation or reform?

 material conditions in most educational institutions in a country or region

Who this book is for

First, this book will be of value to educational-change practitioners worldwide

 regional, provincial, city or district level educational planners and

 leaders/heads of department in educational institutions at all levels who are

 masters level or accredited short course students on Educational (Project)

Why I have written this book

In my experience it is truly rare to encounter an educational-change context in

What is in the book

It is difﬁcult to know where to begin when considering a topic as complex as

 who and/or what the change is most likely to affect

Each section is followed by a list of references, and sections 1 and 2 by some

Ways of using this book

I know that in educational change environments decisions often need to be made

If you are involved in planning for/implementing an educational change

Understanding Educational Change

I have worked in state-system educational settings in different parts of the world

In my experience, an immediate reaction to an abrupt unsupported shift from

visible or invisible ‘resistance’. In situation 1 a reason for such ‘resistance’ may be

 are often the result of political and/or ideological change at national

All of which mean that such changes:

 are almost always very complex to plan, lead and implement

What is educational change?

1. Why do people decide that they want to change aspects of an education

1.1 Why change?

Planning and implementing a large-scale educational change is not at all easy.

maintain or improve their national competitiveness in a rapidly changing global

3. to increase equality of opportunity within society as a whole

1.2 Changes to what?

1.3 The ‘nature’ of educational change

forms of professional behaviour for the different practices that an educational

Initiating educational change

2.1 Starting where people are

I feel that this shows that parents:

 understand the content of education as consisting of speciﬁc visible items of

The educational reality in any context, however similar or different it may be to

5. Level and type of training received by most teachers – their existing

2.2 Identifying and communicating the ‘need for change’

2.3 Making a long-term commitment

The implementation stage

 Local educational leaders/civil servants – representatives of the national

to appropriately support teachers, may all affect teachers’ implementation

3.1 Matching change to local realities

sources of employment). They may vary in terms of the cultural homogeneity of

 demands of high-stakes assessment – whether the content and format of

For a variety of historical, geographical and socio-economic reasons, each local

3.2 Support for learning the what and how of change

If much educational change involves a degree of personal/professional ‘reculturing’

Figure 3.1 Four possible characteristics of educational culture

New ways of behaving might include:

 using a more varied range of teaching approaches, including ones that

change. Such a reculturing process can, as mentioned in chapter 1, make people

Harvey (1999), looking at teachers trying to implement a new model of teaching

I feel that the main weaknesses include the following:

I comment on each of these weaknesses here, drawing widely on Malderez and

material conditions in most educational institutions in a country or region

regional, provincial, city or district level educational planners and

leaders/heads of department in educational institutions at all levels who are

masters level or accredited short course students on Educational (Project)

who and/or what the change is most likely to affect

are often the result of political and/or ideological change at national

are almost always very complex to plan, lead and implement

understand the content of education as consisting of speciﬁc visible items of

Local educational leaders/civil servants – representatives of the national

demands of high-stakes assessment – whether the content and format of

using a more varied range of teaching approaches, including ones that

recognizing that change is going to be a long-term (if not permanent) feature

_ TIME _

School Leadership and Management

the degree of uniformity that it will be possible to achieve among 3YP

the implications of a reﬂective model of teacher education for the content of

try to maximize the stability of any ministry or other national-level